Kazakh language

Lore & Background

Kazakh is a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch, spoken across a vast territory stretching from the Tian Shan mountains to the western shore of the Caspian Sea. It serves as the official state language of Kazakhstan, where nearly 10 million people speak it, and also holds official status in Russia’s Altai Republic. Significant Kazakh-speaking communities exist in China’s Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, home to nearly two million ethnic Kazakhs, as well as in Mongolia’s Bayan-Ölgii Province. Many ethnic Kazakhs throughout the former Soviet Union—including some 472,000 in Russia according to the 2010 census—and in Germany and Turkey also speak the language. Like other Turkic languages, Kazakh is agglutinative and employs vowel harmony, building words by adding suffixes to a stem in a fixed sequence, each suffix expressing a single meaning. The language has three mutually intelligible dialect groups: North-Eastern Kazakh, which is the most widespread and forms the basis for the official language; Southern Kazakh; and Western Kazakh. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz, and Karakalpak, sharing a degree of mutual intelligibility with Karakalpak, while its Western dialects have limited mutual intelligibility with the Altai languages. The Kipchak branch was largely consolidated during the Golden Horde period, and modern Kazakh likely descends from both Chagatay Turkic, spoken by the Timurids, and Kipchak Turkic. Kazakh contains many loanwords from Persian and Arabic due to historical interactions with Iranian groups; Persian served as a lingua franca in the Kazakh Khanate, while Arabic was used in religious settings. Kazakhs used the Arabic script until around 1929, when the Soviet regime introduced a Latin script, followed by Cyrillic in the 1940s. In 2017, a presidential decree ordered a transition from Cyrillic to a Latin script by 2031, with the proposed alphabet resembling Turkish but lacking C and Ç and adding Ä, Ñ, Q, and Ū. Over one million Kazakh speakers in Xinjiang use a modified Perso-Arabic script. Although not endangered, the language was described in 2024 as somewhat vulnerable, with speaker numbers not increasing as rapidly as hoped.

Reader's Guide

Kazakh is significant as the state language of Kazakhstan and a marker of Kazakh national identity. Its history reflects the region's Turkic and Islamic heritage, with influences from Persian and Arabic. Despite not being endangered, Kazakh was described in 2024 as in a somewhat vulnerable position, with speaker growth not as rapid as anticipated. The language's agglutinative grammar and vowel harmony are characteristic of Turkic languages, and its three dialect groups are mutually intelligible. The transition to a Latin alphabet, decreed in 2017, aims to align Kazakh more closely with Turkish and other Turkic languages using Latin script.

Did You Know?

• Kazakh is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz, and Karakalpak.
• The language has three mutually intelligible dialect groups: North-Eastern, Southern, and Western.
• Over one million Kazakh speakers in Xinjiang use a modified version of the Perso-Arabic script.