Kyrgyz is natively spoken by about 4.5 million people, primarily in Kyrgyzstan, where it is the official language, and in neighboring countries with Kyrgyz communities. It is integral to Kyrgyz cultural identity, known for its nomadic traditions, epic poetry, and traditional music. Written in the Cyrillic alphabet (and increasingly in the Latin alphabet), Kyrgyz grammar features a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, vowel harmony, and agglutination, similar to other Turkic languages.