The official language of Kazakhstan is Kazakh, or Qazaq. It belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic language family. It is related to the Nogai, Kyrgyz and Tatar languages. In addition to Kazakh, it is widely spoken in Russian and is used in many official and business contexts. The majority of Kazakhstan’s citizens are bilingual, speaking both Russian and Kazakh. In Kazakhstan under the USSR, it was difficult to keep one’s mother tongue, and most of the younger generation learned Russian because it was more important at the time. This created a whole generation of Kazakhs who forgot their mother tongue and spoke only in Russian. After independence, the Kazakh government began to promote the use of Kazakh again, and today the results are impressive. But there is still a large group of Kazakhs who don’t speak Kazakh.
Until about 1925, Kazakhs used the Arabic script. And most literature and books were in Arabic. Under the influence of the Russian Empire, it was changed to Cyrillic. In 2017, the first president of Kazakhstan, Mr Nazarbayev, declared a new law that from 2025 the change to a Latin script. The new alphabet has 32 letters.
Vocabulary The Kazakh language has many influences, including Arabic, Persian, Russian and more recently some English words used for modern terms.
There are many dialects of the Kazakh language due to groups in different parts of Kazakhstan. The main three are Western Kazakhstan, Southern Kazakhstan and Eastern Kazakhstan. They are not that different from each other, they just have dialects. Although there are millions of places in the world where Kazakh is spoken, such as northern Uzbekistan, southern Russia, China’s Xinjiang province, western Mongolia, and in Europe, Turkey and Germany.
Let’s learn some of the most important words in Kazakh
If you learn and use this word during your stay in Kazakhstan, the locals will be happy to hear it.
To say hello, you can say “Salem”. But between people, it is more common to say “Assalamu-aleikum”.
To say how are you? You can say “Khaliniz Khalai?
To say “What is your name?” you can say “Sizdin atiniz kim?
And to say “My name is Tom” you can say “Menin atim Tom”.
It is also useful to learn the numbers in Kazakh
1-Bir, 2- Eki, 3-Ush, 4-Turt, 5-Bes, 6-Alty, 7-Zheti, 8-Segiz, 9-Togys, 10-On
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