Kazinform () is a Kazakh international

news agency A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and All-news radio, radio and News broadcasting, television Broadcasting, broadcasters. A news agency ma ...

and one of the largest media outlets in

Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a landlocked country primarily in Central Asia, with a European Kazakhstan, small portion in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the Kazakhstan–Russia border, north and west, China to th ...

. It is based in

Astana Astana is the capital city of Kazakhstan. With a population of 1,423,726 within the city limits, it is the second-largest in the country after Almaty, which had been the capital until 1997. The city lies on the banks of the Ishim (river), Ishim ...

. The news agency mainly focuses on national and Eurasian news.

Romanization system

It had its own romanization system for Kazakh which was based on Turkish Latin, in anticipation to the transition from

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

which was targeted to be complete by 2025, but it was never considered by President

Nursultan Nazarbayev Nursultan Abishuly Nazarbayev (born 6 July 1940) is a Kazakhstani politician who served as the first president of Kazakhstan from 1991 to 2019. He also held the special title of Elbasy from 2010 to 2022 and chairman of the Security Council of ...

. The president commented that the new alphabet should contain "no hooks nor superfluous dots". The new Latin alphabet approved by Nazarbayev, which contain apostrophes corresponding certain Cyrillic alphabets, received mixed reactions from the public and linguists. By 2019, the news agency's website began to use the revised 2018 Romanization system in their Latin Kazakh-language version, eventually ditching the Turkish Latin-based system; however, Kazakh Wikipedia and

Google Translate Google Translate is a multilingualism, multilingual neural machine translation, neural machine translation service developed by Google to translation, translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a web applic ...

still used the agency's old Romanization system in their Latin rendition and Kazakh translation feature, respectively. Kazak Grammar, a social media-based group of Kazakh language enthusiasts, proposed an alternative Romanization system which combines the features of the official 2018 system with the Kazinform's system, most notably the retention of Turkish vowels with diacritics. But an unexpected change in the group's direction occurred in early 2020 when the group restarted to ''Noqat'' with their new romanization arrangements which reflects the 2019-2020 revision of the alphabet.

History

Kazinform was established on 13 August 1920 as the

Orenburg Orenburg (, ), formerly known as Chkalov (1938–1957), is the administrative center of Orenburg Oblast, Russia. It lies in Eastern Europe, along the banks of the Ural River, being approximately southeast of Moscow. Orenburg is close to the ...

- Turgai department of the

Russian Telegraph Agency Russian Telegraph Agency (, ROSTA) was the state news agency in Soviet Russia between 1918 and 1935. It was the central information organ of the Soviet Union. After the creation of Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union in 1925, it remained the ne ...

(ROSTA) under the All-Union Central Executive Committee. In 1925 the agency was renamed ''KazROST'', until it was again renamed ''KazTAG'' in 1937. President Nursultan Nazarbayev issued an order for the agency to be renamed in 1997 as KazAAG. In 2002 it was named Kazinform by the Kazakh government. Since 2008 the news agency belongs to the holding company Arna-Media.

References

External links

* News agencies based in Kazakhstan Mass media companies established in 1920 {{media-company-stub