Kaitag Script

Technical specification for the Kaitag Cyrillic script.

Example:

Kaitag	IPA	English
Ьар мейдам азатдеҳ челле чиьачӏурил це: цада йярдицци, цада ихтийарцци. Ьелттай яҡӏлу ра йяь ра деччил дилле, цалццил ца уццбе гон бугара биккан це.	haɾ ˈmejdam azatˈdex ˈtʃelle tʃihatʃʼuˈɾil tse: tsaˈda jæɾˈditsːi, tsaˈda iχtiˈjaɾtsːi. helˈtːaj ˈæqʼlu ɾa jæh ɾa ˈdetʃːil ˈdille, ˈtsaltsːil tsa utsːˈbe gʷan buˈgaɾa biˈkːan tse.	All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Overview

The modern Kaitag alphabet, based on the Cyrillic script, was developed in 2024 and refined in 2026. It consists of 27 Russian letters (excluding Щщ, Фф, Ыы, Ээ, Ёё, Юю), 3 extended Cyrillic letters (Ғғ, Ҡҡ, Ҳҳ), and 12 digraphs (doubled geminates and ejectives with Ӏӏ). Extended notation includes vowels with acute accents for stress and additional digraphs for non-phonemic sounds.

Script Design

1. Extended Cyrillic characters: Ғғ /ʁ/, Ҡҡ /q/, Ҳҳ /x/. These established Cyrillic extensions maintain single-letter representation for basic consonants.

2. Uniform consonant series: doubling for geminates (пп, тт, чч, цц, кк, ҡҡ) and palochka (Ӏӏ) for all ejectives (пӏ, тӏ, чӏ, цӏ, кӏ, ҡӏ) and only for them. This consistently represents six parallel three-way contrasts (plain/geminate/ejective).

3. Repurposed Russian signs for laryngeal sounds: Ьь /h/ and Ъъ /ʔ/. In Russian these letters serve as modifiers without representing sounds themselves. Repurposing them reduces the number of special characters needed.

4. Letter Оо represents labialization /ʷa/ before Аа, while Вв marks both /β/ and rare labialization before other vowels. Since labialization overwhelmingly occurs with /a/, this allows simplified orthography: беркона /beɾkʷana/ "to eat" → беркне /beɾkne/ (masd.).

5. Explicit iotation: Ее /e/ and Яя /æ/ are always pure vowels; Йй /j/ is written explicitly everywhere. This eliminates Russian's context-dependent vowel readings, creating one-to-one sound-letter correspondence.

Alphabet

42 letters, of which 12 are digraphs:

а б в г ғ д е ж з и й к кк кӏ ҡ ҡҡ ҡӏ л м н о п пп пӏ р с т тт тӏ у х ҳ ц цц цӏ ч чч чӏ ш ъ ь я

Collation order: The alphabet sequence above defines the sorting order. Digraphs are treated as single letters sorting after their base consonant; extended characters follow their base letters (ғ after г, ҡ after к, ҳ after х).

Letter frequency data: letter_frequencies.csv

Comparison with Soviet Dagestanian orthographies. Asterisk (*) marks the conventions from the dissertations on Kaitag by Temirbulatova¹ and Gasanova²:

Kaitag	IPA	Soviet Dagestanian
а	/a/	я (iotated)
б	/b/
в	/β/, /ʷ/
г	/g/
ғ	/ʁ/	гъ
д	/d/
е	/e/	э (word-initially or after vowels)
ж	/ʒ/
з	/z/
и	/i/
й	/j/	е, я, ю (iotated vowels)
к	/k/
кк	/kː/
кӏ	/kʼ/
ҡ	/q/	хъ, къ
ҡҡ	/qː/	къ, къкъ* (intervocally)
ҡӏ	/qʼ/	кь, къ
л	/l/
м	/m/
н	/n/
о	/ʷa/	ва
п	/p/
пп	/pː/
пӏ	/pʼ/
р	/ɾ/
с	/s/
т	/t/
тт	/tː/
тӏ	/tʼ/
у	/u/	ю (iotated)
х	/χ/
ҳ	/x/	хь
ц	/ts/
цц	/tsː/
цӏ	/tsʼ/
ч	/tʃ/
чч	/tʃː/
чӏ	/tʃʼ/
ш	/ʃ/
ъ	/ʔ/	гӏ* (adjacent to я)
ь	/h/	гь, хӏ* (adjacent to я)
я	/æ/	аь, аӏ, гӏя* (word-initially), я* (iotated)

Characters

31 unique characters, of which 4 are from extended Cyrillic:

а б в г ғ д е ж з и й к ҡ л м н о п р с т у х ҳ ц ч ш ъ ь я ӏ

Character frequency data: character_frequencies.csv

Extended Cyrillic characters:

Character	Unicode	Name
Ғ ғ	U+0492, U+0493	Cyrillic Letter Ghe with Stroke
Ҡ ҡ	U+04A0, U+04A1	Cyrillic Letter Bashkir Ka
Ҳ ҳ	U+04B2, U+04B3	Cyrillic Letter Ha with Descender
Ӏ ӏ	U+04C0, U+04CF	Cyrillic Letter Palochka

Note on Palochka: Often substituted with digit 1, Latin I/i, lowercase l, vertical bar |, or slash / due to absence from standard Russian keyboards. This practice began with Soviet typewriters and continues today. Corpora, dictionaries, and datasets should normalize these substitutions to the canonical Unicode characters U+04C0 (capital) and U+04CF (lowercase).

Extended Notation

Beyond the core alphabet, extended orthographic notation includes:

• Acute diacritics for stress marking: а́, е́, и́, о́, у́, я́
• Tense fricatives (phonemic status uncertain): сс /sː/, хх /χː/, ҳҳ /xː/, шш /ʃː/
• Marginal sounds (onomatopoeia): ву /w/, гҳ /ɣ/, пв /ɸ/
• Dialectal sounds: гӏ /ʡ/, хӏ /ħ/, ю /uˤ/

These elements are not part of the standard alphabet but are used for precise phonetic documentation, pedagogical purposes, and dialectal variation.

Typing

Input methods are based on the standard Russian ЙЦУКЕН layout to minimize disruption to Russian keyboard users' muscle memory. An optimized Kaitag-specific layout based on character frequency would require a larger text corpus for proper analysis.

Language identifiers for keyboard layouts:

• English: Kaitag
• Russian: кайтагский
• Kaitag: Хайдаҡӏла
• ISO 639-3: xdq

Mobile

The layout replaces five keys for the excluded Russian letters Щ, Ф, Ы, Э, Ю with Ҡ, Ҳ, Ғ, Ъ, Ӏ respectively. These characters are positioned by frequency.

й ц у к е н г ш ҡ з х
ҳ ғ в а п р о л д ж ъ
  я ч с м и т ь б ӏ

Accented vowels for stress marking and excluded Russian letters are accessible via long-press:

у: ю у́
е: э е́ ё
ш: щ
а: а́
п: ф
о: о́
я: я́
и: ы и́

Available for Google Gboard (Google Play), Yandex Keyboard (Google Play, App Store), and HeliBoard (GitHub).

Desktop

The script requires only four additional symbols compared to standard Russian. Compose key sequences can be used to enter these characters without switching keyboard layouts.

Example configuration for WinCompose on Windows:

<Multi_key> <Г> : "Ғ"  # CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER GHE WITH STROKE
<Multi_key> <г> : "ғ"  # CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER GHE WITH STROKE
<Multi_key> <К> : "Ҡ"  # CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER BASHKIR KA
<Multi_key> <к> : "ҡ"  # CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER BASHKIR KA
<Multi_key> <Х> : "Ҳ"  # CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER HA WITH DESCENDER
<Multi_key> <х> : "ҳ"  # CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER HA WITH DESCENDER
<Multi_key> <!> : "Ӏ"  # CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER PALOCHKA
<Multi_key> <1> : "ӏ"  # CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER PALOCHKA

Linux has built-in compose key support. For macOS, macos-compose is available.

Resources

Data

• Kaitag Dictionary (5,000+ lexemes, in development) with usage examples, notes, and cross-references (source)
• Reference corpus: monocorpus.txt (33,615 characters) extracted from Gasanova³
• Unicode exemplar data (base, auxiliary, marks): googlefonts/lang: xdq_Cyrl.textproto

Tools

• Yaziv text converter: Supports transliteration between Kaitag Cyrillic and IPA representations
  • Current orthography: "Cyrillic"
  • Legacy support: "Cyrillic (2024)", "Soviet Cyrillic"
• Google Fonts: Web font service and library

References

• ParaType: Cyrillic typography resource
• Ethnologue: Global language database
• Omniglot: Encyclopedia of writing systems and languages
• Minority Languages of Russia: Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences

Version History

v1.1 (January 2026): Reintroduced palochka (Ӏӏ) as ejective marker, aligning with Dagestanian orthographic tradition. Added extended notation for stress marking and tense fricatives.

v1.0 (February 2024): Initial release introducing extended Cyrillic characters, uniform consonant series representation, and explicit iotation. Used soft sign (Ьь) as dual marker for both /h/ and ejectivity.

License

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. If you use this specification or data in your work, please cite:

Magomedov, M. (2026). Kaitag Cyrillic Script. Retrieved from https://github.com/urssivar/script

Contact: alkaitagi@outlook.com

Footnotes

1. Темирбулатова, С.М. (2006). Хайдакский диалект даргинского языка. Диссертация на соискание учёной степени доктора филологических наук. Махачкала. ↩

2. Гасанова, У.У. (2012). Лексика и словообразование хайдакского диалекта даргинского языка. Диссертация на соискание учёной степени доктора филологических наук. Махачкала. ↩

3. Гасанова, У.У. (2013). Хайдакьла хабарти (Хайдакские сказки). Махачкала, 152 с. Составитель: Гасанова У.У. Редактор: Сивриди Г.Н. ↩