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Kazakh is a Turkic languages of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia by the Kazakhs. It is closely related to Nogai language, Kyrgyz language and Karakalpak. It is the official language of Kazakhstan, and has official status in the Altai Republic of Russia. It is also a significant 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), 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 recognizes three mutually intelligible dialect groups: Northeastern 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, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev decreed that the writing system would change from using Cyrillic script 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 lacking the letters C and Ç and having 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 Persian alphabet for writing.
In China, nearly two million ethnic Kazakhs and Kazakh speakers reside in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang.
Kazakh uses a high volume of loanwords from Persian language and Arabic language due to the frequent historical interactions between Kazakhs and Iranian peoples to the south. Additionally, Persian was a lingua franca in the Kazakh Khanate, which allowed Kazakhs to mix Persian words into their own spoken and written vernacular. Meanwhile, Arabic was used by Kazakhs in and , serving as a language exclusively for religious contexts, similar to how Latin served as a liturgical language in the Western European cultural sphere. The Kazakhs used the Arabic script to write their language until approximately 1929. In the early 1900s, Kazakh activist Akhmet Baitursynuly reformed the Kazakh-Arabic alphabet, but his work was largely overshadowed by the Soviet presence in Central Asia. At that point, the new Soviet regime forced the Kazakhs to use a Latin script, and then a Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Today, Kazakhs use the Cyrillic and Latin scripts to write their language, although a presidential decree from 2017 ordered the Kazakh alphabets by 2031.
Although not an endangered language, in 2024, Kazakh has been described as being placed in a somewhat vulnerable position by the Kazakhstani Minister of Science and Higher Education Sayasat Nurbek, within a category where the number of speakers is not increasing as rapidly as anticipated.
| Kazakh consonant phonemes |
According to Vajda, the front/back quality of vowels is actually one of neutral versus retracted tongue root.
Phonetic values are paired with the corresponding character in Kazakh's Cyrillic and current Latin alphabets.
| +Kazakh vowel phonemes
!
!Front vowel (Advanced tongue root) !Central vowel (Relaxed tongue root) !Back vowel (Retracted tongue root) |
| +Kazakh vowels by their pronunciation ! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2"Front vowel and Central vowel ! colspan="2" | Back vowel |
Cyrillic script was created to better merge the Kazakh language with other languages of the USSR, hence it has some controversial letter readings.
The letter У after a consonant represents a combination of sounds і , ү , ы , ұ with glide , e.g. кіру , су , көру , атысу . Ю undergoes the same process but with at the beginning.
The letter И represents a combination of sounds: i (in front-vowel contexts) or ы (in back vowel contexts) + glide , e.g. тиіс , оқиды . In Russian loanwords, it is realized as (when stressed) or (when unstressed), e.g. изоморфизм .
The letter Я represents either or depending on vowel harmony.
The letter Щ represents , e.g. ащы .
Meanwhile, the letters В, Ё, Ф, Х, Һ, Ц, Ч, Ъ, Ь, Э are only used in loanwords—mostly those of Russian origin, but sometimes of Persian and Arabic origin. They are often substituted in spoken Kazakh.
The table below compares the various scripts.
| А а | ||
| Е е | ||
| О о | ||
The suffix for case is placed after the suffix for number.
| +Declension of nouns for number
!
!Morpheme
!Possible
Forms
!bala
!kirpi !qazaq !mektep !adam !gül !söz | ||||||
| bala lar | kirpi ler | qazaq tar | mektep ter | adam dar | gül der | söz der |
| +Personal pronouns ! colspan="2" | ! Singular ! Plural |
The declension of the pronouns is outlined in the following chart. Singular pronouns exhibit irregularities, while plural pronouns do not. Irregular forms are highlighted in bold.
In addition to the pronouns, there are several more sets of morphemes dealing with person.
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 verb + köru, with the auxiliary verb köru , indicates that the subject of the verb attempted or tried to do something (compare the Japanese てみる temiru construction).
+Morphemes indicating person
! Past/Conditional
Adjectives
in Kazakh are not declined for any grammatical category of the modified noun. Being a head-final language, adjectives are always placed before the noun that they modify. Kazakh has two varieties of adjectives:
Degrees of comparison
Comparative
The comparative form can be created by appending the suffix -(y)raq/-(ı)rek or -tau/-teu/-dau/-dau to an adjective.
Superlative
The superlative form can be created by placing the morpheme eñ before the adjective. The superlative form can also be expressed by reduplication.
Verbs
Kazakh may express different combinations of tense, aspect and grammatical 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 , tūr , jür and jat , 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 and келу may not combine with otyr. Any verb, however, can combine with jat to get a progressive tense meaning.
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:
+Progressive aspect in the present tense +Selectional restrictions on Kazakh auxiliaries ∅ (present/future tense used) jat－ , general marker for progressive aspect. jür – , dynamic/habitual/iterative tūr – , progressive marker to show the swimming is punctual Not a possible sentence in Kazakh otyr – , ungrammatical in this sentence; otyr can only be used for verbs that are stative verb in nature
Annotated text with gloss
From the first stanza and refrain of "Menıñ Qazaqstanym" ("My Kazakhstan"), the national anthem of Kazakhstan:
See also
Notes
Further reading
External links
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