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
Тіл Әлемі - Free PDFs of Kazakh language textbooks by the Kazakhstan government
Kazakh Language Course for Peace Corps Volunteers in Kazakhstan
Grammar Lessons
Entire Kazakh Language Manual [PDF] - Edited version of Peace Corps Kazakh Language Manual
Kazakh Grammatical Sketch - Grammar guide with index
Keyboard
Lexilogos - Kazakh cyrillic 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
Maksat Imangazi - Lessons in English)