the language of the Tuvinians, spoken in the Tuva ASSR by 139,400 people (1970, census) and in the Mongolian People’s Republic by approximately 20,000 people. Tuvinian is related to the Turkic languages. It has four dialects: the central, on which the national colloquial and literary languages are based, the western, the Todzha, and the southeastern dialect. The development of Tuvinian, particularly the southeastern dialect, was influenced by Mongolian. Tuvinian phonology is marked by an opposition between strong (aspirated) and weak consonants and between pharyngealized and pure vowels. In morphology, Tuvinian delimits the dative and aditive cases. Verbs have a compound conditional mood and a near future tense in -kalakl-kelek. A writing system based on the Latin alphabet was created in 1930; the Cyrillic-based writing system currently in use was introduced in 1941.