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Kazakh

Kazakh

Summary

Kazakh is natively spoken by about 13 million people, primarily in Kazakhstan, where it is the official language, and in neighboring countries with Kazakh communities. It is integral to Kazakh cultural identity, known for its nomadic heritage, traditional music, and hospitality. Written in the Cyrillic alphabet (and transitioning to the Latin alphabet), Kazakh grammar features a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, vowel harmony, and agglutination, where suffixes are added to roots to modify meaning.

Stats

  • Language Family: Turkic

  • Writing System: Cyrillic, Latin

  • Writing System Type: Alphabet

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: N

  • Morphology: Agglutinative

  • Cases: 7

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 0

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 6

  • Word Order: SOV

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 9

  • Number of Consonants: 18

Areas Where Spoken

  • Kazakhstan (official) (64.4%) (12.6 mil)

Resources

Books


Grammar Lessons


Keyboard


Dictionaries


Radio

  • Radio | Kaztrk.kz (group of stations, choose from ‘Казак радиосы’ to ‘Classic радиосы’ on drop-down bar left of ‘KAZ’, then click ‘ОНЛАЙН’)


Websites


Videos

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