As the Kazakh people have mixed a lot in the past with many different ethnic groups, such as Russians, Kyrgyz, Han Chinese, Uighurs and Mongolians, they have adopted many words from these languages into their own. The language is said to have developed from Chagatai, a language used in Eastern Turkey, and still shares many words and grammatical structures with Turkish.
Kazakh is the official language of the Republic of Kazakhstan, although Russian is also widely spoken. It is estimated that 64.4% of the country’s 18 million population speak the language in their day to day life, and its use is strongly promoted by the government. Although Kazakh is being increasingly used in print and electronic media, business and government affairs ares still mostly conducted in Russian which serves as the ‘language of inter-ethnic communication’. Both languages are taught in schools, where some emphasize Kazakh, others Russian. Radio and television broadcasts are also largely divided into both Russian and Kazakh.
Other languages
Kazakh is divided into three different dialects: Western, Northeastern and Southern, which can confuse you if you learn Kazakh in Astana in the Northeast then travel to Aktau in the south on holiday, as you may find it quite difficult to understand the differences. Other native languages of Kazakhstan are Dungan, Ili Turki, Ingush, Plautdietsch, and Sinte Romani, though these tend to be spoken in the minority. As there are countless other nationalities who reside in Kazakhstan, you are bound to hear a whole range of other languages spoken, such as Azeri, Belarusian, Greek, and Korean. Kazakh is also spoken in Afghanistan, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
Reading and writing Kazakh
Kazakh was written for the first time in the 1860s using an Arabic script. A Latin script began to be used in 1929 until Stalin introduced a modified form of Cyrillic as a means of unifying the Central Asian Republics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many countries including Kazakhstan agreed to adopt the Latin alphabet in order to make trade easier and improve relations among themselves and the outside world, however the Cyrillic alphabet is still widely used.
This article was contributed by Optimum Translation Agency, offering language services in Kazakh, Russian and English.