Kyrgyz is a Kipchak Turkic language most closely related to Kazakh, spoken by roughly 5 million people in the mountainous Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan and by diaspora communities in China and Afghanistan. The language has an extraordinarily rich oral literary tradition centred on the Manas epic — a cyclic poem of more than 500,000 lines describing the hero Manas and his descendants, making it one of the longest oral epics in the world. Kyrgyz was first written using Arabic script, then briefly Latin from 1928 to 1940, and finally Cyrillic from 1940 — a script it still uses today. Unlike Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan has not yet launched a transition to Latin script. Russian holds co-official status and is widely used in business and government, particularly in the capital Bishkek, where many ethnic Kyrgyz are Russian-dominant. Kyrgyz itself is spoken primarily in rural areas and is undergoing revitalisation efforts.
