Kazakiska

Kazakiska, or Kazakh, is a Turkic language spoken primarily in Kazakhstan and by Kazakh communities in neighboring countries and the diaspora. It belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic language family, closely related to Kyrgyz and Karakalpak.

Most speakers are in Kazakhstan, where Kazakh is an official language alongside Russian. Smaller communities speak Kazakh in China’s Xinjiang region, Mongolia, Russia, and elsewhere. Estimates place native speakers around 12 to 15 million, with additional second-language users among the Kazakh diaspora.

Historically written in Arabic script, Kazakh was transformed into a Cyrillic-based writing system in the Soviet era; a government-led transition to a Latin alphabet began in the 2020s and aims to complete in the coming years. In Kazakhstan, Kazakh is used in education, media, and public life; in other countries, orthographies vary, often Cyrillic or locally adapted scripts.

Linguistically, Kazakh features agglutinative morphology and vowel harmony, with a subject–object–verb basic word order. It uses extensive suffixation to mark grammatical relations and employ tense, number, and mood. The language has several regional varieties or dialects, with standard Kazakh mainly based on northern varieties. Vocabulary shows Russian, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish loanwords, reflecting centuries of contact.