Kazakh
Qazaq
қазақша or қазақ тілі قازاقشا or قازاق ٴتىلى qazaqşa or qazaq tılı
Kazakh in Cyrillic, Latin, and Perso-Arabic scripts.
Pronunciation	[qɑzɑqˈʃɑ] Kazakh pronunciation: [qɑˈzɑq tɪˈlɪ]
Native to	Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan
Region	Central Asia (Turkestan)
Ethnicity	Kazakhs
Native speakers	17 million (2021 census)[1]
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Kipchak Kipchak–Nogai Kazakh
Writing system	Kazakh alphabets (Cyrillic script, Latin 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: Organization of Turkic States Collective Security Treaty Organization
Regulated by	Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan
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 Qazaq^[a] (pronounced [qɑzɑqˈʃɑ], [qɑˈzɑq tɪˈlɪ]^[3][4]) is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia by Kazakhs. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz and Karakalpak. It is the official language of Kazakhstan and a significant minority language in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, north-western 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. 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 closely related Karakalpak while its Western dialects maintain limited mutual intelligibility with Altai languages.

In October 2017, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev decreed that the writing system would change from using Cyrillic 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.

Geographic distribution

Speakers of Kazakh (mainly Kazakhs) are 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^[5] on population and proportion of Kazakh speakers).^[6]

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

History

The Kipchak branch of Turkic languages, which Kazakh is borne out of, was mainly solidified during the reign of the Golden Horde. The modern Kazakh language is said to have originated in approximately 1465 AD during the formation of the Kazakh Khanate. Modern Kazakh is likely a descendant of both Chagatay Turkic as spoken by the Timurids and Kipchak Turkic as spoken in the Golden Horde.

Kazakh uses a high volume of loanwords from Persian and Arabic due to the frequent historical interactions between Kazakhs and Iranian ethnic groups 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 mosques and mausoleums, serving as a language exclusively for religious contexts similar to how Latin served as a liturgical language in the 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.

Phonology and orthography

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. This system only applies to the open vowels /e/, /ɪ/, /ʏ/ and not /ɑ/, and happens in the next syllables.^[7] Thus, (in Latin script) jūldyz 'star', bügın 'today', and ülken 'big' are actually pronounced as jūldūz, bügün, ülkön.

Consonants

The following chart depicts the consonant inventory of standard Kazakh;^[8] many of the sounds, however, are allophones of other sounds or appear only in recent loanwords. 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. (/t͡s/ rarely appears in normal speech.) Kazakh has 19 native consonant phonemes; these are the stops /p, b, t, d, k, ɡ, q/, fricatives /s, z, ɕ, ʑ, ʁ/, nasals /m, n, ŋ/, liquids /ɾ, l/, and two glides /w, j/.^[9] The sounds /f, v, χ, h, t͡s, t͡ɕ/ are found only in loanwords. /ʑ/ is heard as an alveolopalatal affricate in the Kazakh dialects of Uzbekistan and Xinjiang, China. The sounds and may be analyzed as allophones of /k/ and /ɡ/ in words with back vowels, but exceptions occur in loanwords.

• All the phonemes in the table are their pronunciation in front vowels environment. Consonants , , , also have back allophones , , , correspondingly.  
• All nasals agree in place of articulation with the following plosives.
• Voicing distinction only exists word-internally.
• The chart does not include loan sounds such as /f/, /t͡s/, /x/ etc. that are substituted in native speech.
• Voiced obstruents syllable-finally become devoiced.^[7]

Vowels

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.^[11]

According to Vajda, the front/back quality of vowels is actually one of neutral versus retracted tongue root.^[10]

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

• There is significant debate over the Kazakh vowel phoneme chart, but all analysis agrees on an eight-vowel system with being artificially added due to Arab and Persian influence.
• The vowel /e̞/ is often pronounced /je̞/ at the beginning of the word, with exceptional root e-. Urban Kazakh tends to palatalize all /e̞/, caused by Russian influence.^[12]

Vowel harmony

Kazakh exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony (also called soft-hard harmony), and arguably weakened rounding harmony which is implied in the first syllable of the word. All vowels after the first rounded syllable are the subject to this harmony with the exception of /ɑ/, and in the following syllables, e.g. өмір , қосы . Notably, urban Kazak tends to violate rounding harmony, as well as pronouncing Russian borrowings against the rules.^[12]

Stress

Most words in Kazakh are stressed in the last syllable, except:^[13]

• When counting objects, numbers are stressed in the first syllable, but stressed in the last syllable in collective numbers suffixed by -eu (bıreu, altau from bır, alty):

bır, ekı, üş, tört, bes, alty, jetı, ...

'one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, ...'

• Definite and negative pronouns are stressed in the first syllable:

bärıne eşkımge

'to everyone, to no one'

Orthography

Nowadays, Kazakh is mostly written in the Cyrillic script, with an Arabic-based alphabet being used by minorities in China. Since October 26, 2017, via Presidential Decree 569, Kazakhstan will adopt the Latin script by 2025.^[14][15]

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 /ɪ/, ү /ʏ/, ы /ɤ̞/, ұ /o̞/ with glide ?pojem=,^[16] e.g. кіру , су , көру kø̞ɾʏw, атысу ɑtɤ̞sɤ̞w. Ю undergoes the same process but with /j/ at the beginning.

The letter И represents a combination of sounds i /ɪ/, ы /ɤ̞/ + glide /j/,^[16] e.g. тиіс /tɪjɪs/, оқиды /ɒqɤ̞jdɤ̞/

The letter Я and often digraph ЙЯ represent two sounds /jɑ/ and /jæ/ depending on the harmony.

The letter Щ represents /ʃ.ʃ/ in words of Turkic origin, e.g. ащы /ɑʃ.ʃɤ̞/

Meanwhile, the letters В, Ё, Ф, Х, Һ, Ц, Ч, ъ, ь, Э are only used in loan words, mostly Russian. They are often substituted in spoken Kazakh.

Articles and izafetedit

The accusative affixes -(X)n; -y/-ı; -ğy/-gı; -ny/-nı; -dy/-dı; -ty/-tı can be used as definite articles:

• tıl 'language' > tılı 'the language',
• äke 'father' > äkegı; äkenı 'the father',
• Qazaqstanda 'in Kazakhstan' > Qazaqstandağy 'in the Kazakhstan',
• dosy 'friend' > dosyn 'the friend'.

Kazakh bır, bıreu 'a/an, one, some, any' can be used as an indefinite article:

• bır adam 'a human',
• bır alma 'an apple',
• bırler 'ones',
• bıreu 'some',
• bıreuler 'some ones'.

The genitive affixes -dyñ/-dıñ; -tyñ/-tıñ; -nyñ/-nıñ can be used as definite articles:

• adam däpterı 'human's notebook' > adamnyñ däpterı 'the human's notebook',
• äke ūly 'dad's son' > äkenıñ ūly 'the dad's son',
• qazaq dombyrasy 'Kazakh's dombyra' > qazaqtyñ dombyrasy 'the Kazakh's dombyra'.

Grammaredit

Kazakh is generally verb-final, though various permutations on SOV (subject–object–verb) word order can be used, for example, due to topicalization.^[17] 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.^[18]

Nounsedit

Kazakh has no noun class or gender system. Nouns are declined for number (singular or plural) and one of seven cases:

• Nominative
• Accusative
• Genitive
• Dative
• Locative
• Ablative
• Instrumental^[11]

The suffix for case is placed before the suffix for number.

Pronounsedit

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 do not. Irregular forms are highlighted in bold.^[18]