Kazakh
Kazak
Қазақша or қазақ тілі Template:Rtl-lang or Template:Rtl-lang Qazaqsha or qazaq tili
Pronunciation	[qɑzɑqˈɕɑ] [qɑˈzɑq tɪˈlɪ]
Native to	Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan
Region	Central Asia (Turkestan)
Ethnicity	Kazakhs
Native speakers	22 million (2019)[1]
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Kipchak Kipchak–Nogai Kazakh
Writing system	Kazakh alphabets (Latin script, Cyrillic script, Arabic script, Kazakh Braille)
Official status
Official language in	Kazakhstan  Russia  Altai Republic[2]  China Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture Barköl Kazakh Autonomous County Mori Kazakh Autonomous County Aksay Kazakh Autonomous County Organisations: Turkic Council Collective Security Treaty Organization
Regulated by	Kazakh language agency
Language codes
ISO 639-1	kk
ISO 639-2	kaz
ISO 639-3	kaz
Glottolog	kaza1248
Linguasphere	44-AAB-cc
The Kazakh-speaking world:   regions where Kazakh is the language of the majority   regions where Kazakh is the language of a significant minority
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Kazakh or Kazak (Latin: qazaqsha or qazaq tili, Cyrillic: қазақша or қазақ тілі, Arabic: Template:Rtl-lang or Template:Rtl-lang, pronounced [qɑzɑqˈɕɑ], [qɑˈzɑq tɪˈlɪ]), is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz and Karakalpak. Kazakh is the official language of Kazakhstan and a significant minority language in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, China and in the Bayan-Ölgii Province of Mongolia. Kazakh is also spoken by many ethnic Kazakhs through the former Soviet Union (approximately 472,000 in Russia according to the 2010 Russian Census), Germany, Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan.

Like other Turkic languages, Kazakh is an agglutinative language and it employs vowel harmony.

In October 2017, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev decreed that the government would transition from using Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet by 2025.^[3] President Nazarbayev signed on February 19, 2018 an amendment to the decree of October 26, 2017 No. 569 "On translating the Kazakh alphabet from Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin script."^[4] The amended alphabet uses ⟨sh⟩ and ⟨ch⟩ for the Kazakh sounds /ɕ/ and /tɕ/, respectively and eliminates the use of apostrophes.^[5]

The Kazakstani language (often called Qazaqsha) has its speakers (mainly Kazakhs) 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^[6] on population and proportion of Kazakh speakers).^[7]

In China, nearly two million ethnic Kazakhs and Kazakh speakers reside in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang.^[8]

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.^[9] 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.^[10]

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.^[11][12] 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.^[13] The transition was halted temporarily on December 13, 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."^[14] However, on January 30, 2015, the Minister of Culture and Sports Arystanbek Mukhamediuly announced that a transition plan was underway, with specialists working on the orthography in order to accommodate the phonological aspects of the language.^[15] 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".^[10]

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.^[16][17] As of 2018^[update], 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.^[9]

On October 26, 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,^[18][19] a decision taken to emphasise Kazakh culture after the era of Soviet rule^[20] and to facilitate the use of digital devices.^[21] 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.^[22]

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.^[23][5] However, many citizens state that the officially introduced alphabet needs lots of improvements and changes. 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.

In October 2019, President Tokayev expressed his concerns about all three versions of Latin alphabet and asked linguists to propose a more thoughtful version without haste.^[24][25] A new version of the alphabet, elaborated by the Baitursynov Institute of Linguistics and specialists from the official working group on script transition, was proposed in November 2019, using breves, umlauts and cedillas instead of accents and digraphs and introducing spelling changes to stick more accurately to Kazakh phonology.^[26]

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.

The following chart depicts the consonant inventory of standard Kazakh;^[27] many of the sounds, however, are allophones of other sounds or appear only in recent loan-words. The 18 consonant phonemes listed by Vajda are without parentheses—since these are phonemes, their listed place and manner of articulation are very general, and will vary from what is shown. The phonemes /f/, /v/, /t͡ɕ/ and /x/ only occur in recent borrowings, mostly from Russian.

In the table, the elements left of a divide are voiceless, while those to the right are voiced.

Kazakh has a system of 12 phonemic vowels, 3 of which are diphthongs. The rounding contrast and /æ/ generally only occur as phonemes in the first syllable of a word, but do occur later allophonically; see the section on harmony below for more information. Moreover, the /æ/ sound has been included artificially due to the influence of Arabic, Persian and, later, Tatar languages during the Islamic period.^[29] The letter "e" is often palatalised due to Russian influence.

According to Vajda, the front/back quality of vowels is actually one of neutral versus retracted tongue root.^{[citation needed]}

Phonetic values are paired with the corresponding character in Kazakh's Cyrillic and current Latin alphabets.

Kazakh is generally verb-final, though various permutations on SOV (subject–object–verb) word order can be used, for example, due to topicalization.^[30] 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.^[9]

There are eight personal pronouns in Kazakh:

The declension of the pronouns is outlined in the following chart. Singular pronouns exhibit irregularities, while plural pronouns don't. Irregular forms are highlighted in bold.^[9]

In addition to the pronouns, there are several more sets of morphemes dealing with person.^[9]

Kazakh may express different combinations of tense, aspect and mood through the use of various verbal morphology or through a system of auxiliary verbs, many of which might better be considered light verbs. The present tense is a prime example of this; progressive tense in Kazakh is formed with one of four possible auxiliaries. These auxiliaries "otyr" (sit), "tur" (stand), "júr" (go) and "jat" (lie), encode various shades of meaning of how the action is carried out and also interact with the lexical semantics of the root verb: telic and non-telic actions, semelfactives, durative and non-durative, punctual, etc. There are selectional restrictions on auxiliaries: motion verbs, such as бару (go) and келу (come) may not combine with "otyr". Any verb, however, can combine with "jat" (lie) to get a progressive tense meaning.^[9]

While it is possible to think that different categories of aspect govern the choice of auxiliary, it is not so straightforward in Kazakh. Auxiliaries are internally sensitive to the lexical semantics of predicates, for example, verbs describing motion:^[9]

In addition to the complexities of the progressive tense, there are many auxiliary-converb pairs that encode a range of aspectual, modal, volitional, evidential and action- modificational meanings. For example, the pattern -yp kórý, with the auxiliary verb kórý (see), indicates that the subject of the verb attempted or tried to do something (compare the Japanese てみる temiru construction).^[9]

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

• 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