Kazakh language

Speakers of Kazakh (mainly Kazakhs) are spread over a vast territory from the Tian Shan to the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Kazakh is the official state language of Kazakhstan, with nearly 10 million speakers (based on information from the CIA World Factbook[9] on population and proportion of Kazakh speakers).[10]

In China, nearly two million ethnic Kazakhs and Kazakh speakers reside in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang.[11]

Kazakh Arabic and Latin script in 1924

The oldest known written records of languages closely related to Kazakh were written in the Old Turkic alphabet, though it is not believed that any of these varieties were direct predecessors of Kazakh.[12] Modern Kazakh, going back approximately one thousand years, was written in the Arabic script until 1929, when Soviet authorities introduced a Latin-based alphabet, and then a Cyrillic alphabet in 1940.[13]

Nazarbayev first brought up the topic of using the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet as the official script for Kazakh in Kazakhstan in October 2006.[14][15] A Kazakh government study released in September 2007 said that a switch to a Latin script over a 10- to 12-year period was feasible, at a cost of $300 million.[16] The transition was halted temporarily on 13 December 2007, with President Nazarbayev declaring: "For 70 years the Kazakhstanis read and wrote in Cyrillic. More than 100 nationalities live in our state. Thus we need stability and peace. We should be in no hurry in the issue of alphabet transformation."[17] However, on 30 January 2015, the Minister of Culture and Sports Arystanbek Mukhamediuly announced that a transition plan was underway, with specialists working on the orthography to accommodate the phonological aspects of the language.[18] In presenting this strategic plan in April 2017, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev described the twentieth century as a period in which the "Kazakh language and culture have been devastated".[13]

Nazarbayev ordered Kazakh authorities to create a Latin Kazakh alphabet by the end of 2017, so written Kazakh could return to a Latin script starting in 2018.[19][20] As of 2018, Kazakh is written in Cyrillic in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, Kazakh is written in Latin in Kazakhstan, while more than one million Kazakh speakers in China use an Arabic-derived alphabet similar to the one that is used to write Uyghur.[12]

2018 Latin alphabet for the Kazakh language, adopted by Presidential Decree 569 (26 October 2017); Amended by Decree 637 (19 February 2018)[21]

On 26 October 2017, Nazarbayev issued Presidential Decree 569 for the change to a finalized Latin variant of the Kazakh alphabet and ordered that the government's transition to this alphabet be completed by 2025,[21][22] a decision taken to emphasise Kazakh culture after the era of Soviet rule[23] and to facilitate the use of digital devices.[24] But the initial decision to use a novel orthography employing apostrophes, which make the use of many popular tools for searching and writing text difficult, has generated controversy.[25]

The alphabet was revised the following year by Presidential Decree 637 of 19 February 2018 and the use of apostrophes was discontinued and replaced with the use of diacritics and digraphs.[26][5] However, many citizens state that the officially introduced alphabet needs much improvements. Moreover, Kazakh became the second Turkic language to use the "ch" and "sh" digraphs after the Uzbek government adapted them in their version of the Latin alphabet.

The new version of the Kazakh Latin alphabet proposed in 2019

In 2020, the President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called for another revision of the Latin alphabet with a focus on preserving the original sounds and pronunciation of the Kazakh language.[27][28] This revision, presented to the public in November 2019 by academics from the Baitursynov Institute of Linguistics, and specialists belonging to the official working group on script transition, uses umlauts, breves and cedillas instead of digraphs and acute accents, and introduces spelling changes in order to reflect more accurately the phonology of Kazakh.[8] This revision is a slightly modified version of the Turkish alphabet, dropping the letter C and having four additional letters that do not exist in Turkish: Ä, Q, Ŋ and W.

Kazakh exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony, with some words of recent foreign origin (usually of Russian or Arabic origin) as exceptions. There is also a system of rounding harmony which resembles that of Kyrgyz, but which does not apply as strongly and is not reflected in the orthography.

Kazakh is generally verb-final, though various permutations on SOV (subject–object–verb) word order can be used, for example, due to topicalization.[32] Inflectional and derivational morphology, both verbal and nominal, in Kazakh, exists almost exclusively in the form of agglutinative suffixes. Kazakh is a nominative-accusative, head-final, left-branching, dependent-marking language.[12]

From the first stanza of "Meniń Qazaqstanym" ("My Kazakhstan"), the national anthem of Kazakhstan:

Kazakh and Kyrgyz may be better seen as mutually intelligible dialects or varieties of a single tongue which are regarded as separate languages for sociopolitical reasons. They differ mainly phonetically while the lexicon and grammar are much the same, although both have standardized written forms that may differ in some ways. Until the 20th century, both languages used a common written form of Chaghatai Turki.[33]

While both languages share common loanwords from Persian and Arabic, Kyrgyz lexicon includes much wider range of Mongolian loanwords.

• BGN/PCGN romanization of Kazakh
• Turkic languages
• Kazakh literature
• Languages of Kazakhstan

• Kara, Dávid Somfai (2002), Kazak, Lincom Europa, ISBN 9783895864704
• Mark Kirchner: "Kazakh and Karakalpak". In: The Turkic languages. Ed. by Lars Johanson and É. Á. Csató. London [u.a.] : Routledge, 1998. (Routledge language family descriptions). S.318-332.

Kazakh edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikivoyage has a phrasebook for Kazakh.

• Kazakh Cyrillic–Latin (new) converter
• Kazakh Cyrillic–Latin (old)–Arabic converter
• Kazakh language, alphabet and pronunciation
• Aliya S. Kuzhabekova, "Past, Present and Future of Language Policy in Kazakhstan" (M.A. thesis, University of North Dakota, 2003)
• Russian–Kazakh Kazakh–Russian dictionary
• Kazakh language recordings, British Library
• Kazakh – Apertium
• Kazakh<>Turkish Dictionary
• Kazakhstan in the CIA World Factbook
• US Peace Corps Kazakh Language Courses transcribed to HTML