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[3] on population and proportion of Kazakh speakers).[4]

In China, nearly two million ethnic Kazakhs and Kazakh speakers reside in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang.[5]

The first people to inhabit the territory of modern Kazakhstan were the Scythians, who were of Iranian descent. The Göktürks migrated into the area in the sixth century AD and conquered much of the Scythian homeland, which led to the Turkification of the region. In the 12th century AD, the Kimeks later succeeded the Göktürks and also introduced a new Turkic tongue to the Kazakh steppe.

The Kipchak branch of Turkic languages, which Kazakh is borne out of, was mainly solidified during the reign of the Golden Horde, whose inhabitants fully spread Islam and the closest predecessor of the Kazakh language to the Kazakh steppe. The modern Kazakh language is said to have originated in approximately 1465 AD during the formation of the Sunni Muslim Kazakh Khanate. Modern Kazakh is likely a descendant of both Chagatay Turkic as spoken by the Timurids and Kipchak Turkic as spoken in the Golden Horde.

As a language associated with a predominantly Muslim culture, Kazakh uses a high volume of loanwords from Persian and Arabic due to the frequent historical interactions between Kazakhs and Iranian ethnic groups to the south. Additionally, Persian was a lingua franca in the Kazakh Khanate, which allowed Kazakhs to mix Persian words into their own spoken and written vernacular. Meanwhile, Arabic was used by Kazakhs in mosques and mausoleums, and served as a language exclusively for religious contexts.

The Kazakhs used the Arabic script to write their language until approximately 1929. In the early 1900s, Kazakh activist Ahmed Baytursinuli reformed the Kazakh-Arabic alphabet, but his work was largely overshadowed by the Soviet presence in Central Asia. At that point, the new Soviet regime forced the Kazakhs to use a Latin script, and then a Cyrillic script in the 1940s in an effort to thoroughly Russianize them. Today, Kazakhs use the Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic scripts to write their language.

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.[6] 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.[7]

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.[8][9] 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.[10] 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."[11] However, on 30 January 2015, the Minister of Culture and Sports Arystanbek Muhamediuly announced that a transition plan was underway, with specialists working on the orthography to accommodate the phonological aspects of the language.[12] 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".[7]

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.[13][14] As of 2018, Kazakh is written in Cyrillic in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, 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.[6]

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,[15][16] a decision taken to emphasise Kazakh culture after the era of Soviet rule[17] and to facilitate the use of digital devices.[18] However, the initial decision to use a novel orthography employing apostrophes, which make the use of many popular tools for searching and writing text difficult, generated controversy.[19]

Therefore, on 19 February 2018, the Presidential Decree 637 was issued in which the use of apostrophes was discontinued and replaced with the use of diacritics and digraphs, making Kazakh the second Turkic language to use <ch> and <sh> after the Uzbek government adapted them in their version of the Latin alphabet..[20][21] However, many citizens state that the officially introduced alphabet needs further improvements.

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.[22][23] 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.[24] This revision is a slightly modified version of the Turkish alphabet, dropping the letters C Ç and having four additional letters that do not exist in Turkish: Ä, Q, Ñ and Ū.

In February 2021, Kazakhstan reaffirmed its plans for a gradual transition to a Latin-based Kazakh alphabet through the year 2031.[25]

The Arabic script for Kazakh remains in official use in China and other regions where Kazakh is spoken outside of Kazakhstan and Russia. Unlike the basic Arabic alphabet, which is more properly called an abjad, the adapted Kazakh Arabic script is a true alphabet, with individual characters for each sound in the language.

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. This system only applies to the open vowels /e/, /ɪ/, /ʏ/ and not /ɑ/, and happens in the next syllables.[26] Thus, (in Latin script) jūldyz ‘star’, bügın ‘today’, and ülken ‘big’ are actually pronounced as jūldūz, bügün, ülkön.

Kazakh is generally verb-final, though various permutations on SOV (subject–object–verb) word order can be used, for example, due to topicalization.[33] 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.[6]

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

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

• Kara, Dävid 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)
• 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