Kyrgyz has been written in three alphabets within living memory, and the sequence is a compact record of how state policy reaches into religious life. Before the Soviet period it was written, where it was written at all, in an Arabic script adapted for Turkic sounds, the same script in which the Quran was read and in which the clerical class was literate.
A Latin alphabet was introduced in 1928 as part of a wider Turkic latinisation that cut the reading public off from the older religious literature at a stroke. Cyrillic replaced Latin from 1940. The result is that a Kyrgyz reader today reaches the pre-revolutionary religious and epic manuscripts only through transcription, while Kyrgyz communities in Xinjiang, who never went through either change, continue to use a modified Arabic alphabet and can read them directly.
The language itself is Kipchak Turkic, close to Kazakh and Altai, with vowel harmony and a rich system of participial constructions that the epic style exploits heavily. Its Islamic vocabulary is largely Arabic and Persian in origin, arriving through Chagatai, while the vocabulary of the older sky and ancestor religion is Turkic and native, and a manaschi moves between the two registers in a single passage.