Kyrgyzstan teeters on brink of anarchy

Growing unrest in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan last week peaked with thousands of ethnic Uzbek opposition members taking to the streets to demand the resignation of president Askar Akayev.

Amid ugly scenes as protestors clashed with security forces, Kurmanbek Bakiyev of the People's Movement of Kyrgyzstan slammed rumoured government plans to reduce the country to a state of vowel-less linguistic penury. Said Bakiyev: "We've only got one proper vowel in the bloody name as it is — all other gaps between consonants are plugged with an improbable number of 'ys'. There are only eleven people in the world who can spell 'Kyrgyzstan' without the aid of an atlas. I fear for the future."

Akayev sought to allay concerns that he plans a Moscow-backed campaign of orthographic destabilisation, saying: "We have no plans to create the Peoples' Republic of Krgzst'n. Au contraire, I am currently in dialogue with the US for an emergency package of extra vowels for immediate deployment across the country. I fully expect Kyrgyzstan to be as vowel-rich as neighbouring Uzbekistan by 2007.

The EU last night also offered to aid ailing Kyrgyzstan. A team of linguists is today en route to the southern city of Jalal-Abad where it hopes to transfer around 10,000 examples of the locally-abundant "a" to outlying rural districts before ethnic tensions reach boiling point.

Previously

• Germans plot world's longest noun
• Government promises extended alphabet by 2004
• Archaeologists put the ‘i’ back in aluminum