Kazakh language

Kazakh is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch, spoken in Central Asia by the Kazakhs. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz, and Karakalpak. It is the official language of Kazakhstan and has official status in the Altai Republic of Russia. It is also a minority language in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, China, and in the Bayan-Ölgii Province of western Mongolia. The language is also spoken by many ethnic Kazakhs throughout the former Soviet Union (some 472,000 in Russia according to the 2010 Russian census), as well as in Germany and Turkey.

Like other Turkic languages, Kazakh is an agglutinative language and employs vowel harmony. Kazakh builds words by adding suffixes one after another to the word stem, with each suffix expressing only one unique meaning and following a fixed sequence. Ethnologue recognises three mutually intelligible dialect groups: North-Eastern Kazakh—the most widely spoken variety, which also serves as the basis for the official language—Southern Kazakh, and Western Kazakh. The language shares a degree of mutual intelligibility with the closely related Karakalpak language, while its Western dialects maintain limited mutual intelligibility with the Altai languages.

In October 2017, the then president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, decreed that the writing system would change from Cyrillic to Latin script by 2025. The proposed Latin alphabet has been revised several times and, as of January 2021, is close to the inventory of the Turkish alphabet, though it lacks the letters C and Ç and has four additional letters: Ä, Ñ, Q, and Ū (though other letters, such as Y, have different values in the two languages). It is scheduled to be phased in from 2023 to 2031. Over one million Kazakh speakers in Xinjiang use a modified version of the Perso-Arabic script for writing.