Interesting facts about the language

The Kazakh language belongs to the Turkic language family. More precisely, Kazakh is part of the Western Turkic languages, the Kipchak languages. A characteristic of this language family is that they are particularly closely related. So, if you already speak Turkish, Azerbaijani, or Uzbek, you will learn Kazakh quickly. On the other hand, your knowledge of Kazakh will help you if you want to learn one of the aforementioned languages in the future. Around 11 million people speak Kazakh. Kazakh is the official language in Kazakhstan. Outside of Kazakhstan, you will also occasionally hear and speak this language in China, Mongolia, Russia, and Uzbekistan. In terms of its spelling, Kazakh has come a long way: Until the beginning of the 19th century, Kazakh was written using the Arabic script. This was followed by a brief period in which Kazakh was written using Latin letters (like German). Starting in 1930—during the time when Kazakhstan was a union republic of the Soviet Union—Kazakhs wrote their language in Cyrillic letters. To represent sounds found only in Kazakh, the Cyrillic alphabet was expanded by nine letters. Today—after independence—there is talk of whether to return to writing in the Latin script. This step is planned for 2010. The Kazakh Latin script used then will be a modification of the Turkish Latin script.