Kazakhstan's culture: two languages, a nomad's household and a dombra

Which languages Kazakhstan speaks at home and at work

Kazakh is the state language, and Russian, in the presidential office's wording, "has the status of the language of interethnic communication". The 2021 census measured the gap between the two. It recorded 80.1% of the population as speaking Kazakh proficiently and 83.7% as speaking Russian, while only 49.3% of the population, and 63.4% of ethnic Kazakhs, spoke Kazakh every day.

Kazakh belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages, close to Nogai and Karakalpak. Words from Arabic and Persian make up about 15% of its vocabulary, with further borrowings from Mongolian and Russian. A literary standard grew out of folklore and the work of Abai Qunanbayuli and the educator Ybyrai Altynsarin in the second half of the 19th century and was largely settled in the 20th.

The script has changed more often than the language. In January 2015 the government announced that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic for Kazakh by 2025, and a step-by-step move to Latin was the first of six projects in the 2017 programme of "spiritual modernisation", Ruhani Zhangyru. The same programme set out a doctrine of the "Seven Facets of the Great Steppe": the culture of horsemanship, the ancient metallurgy of the steppe, the animal style in art, the Golden Man, the cradle of the Turkic world, the Great Silk Road, and the land of apples and tulips. It also paid for contemporary Kazakh poetry and prose to be translated into the six UN languages; the English anthology was presented at the British Library in London on 25 September 2019.

Schools teach in Kazakh, in Russian or in both, and English and Turkish have spread among younger people since 1991.

The 2026 constitution moved the balance again. By the Caspian Policy Center's reading it changes the status of Russian from a language used on a par with Kazakh to one used alongside it, and officials will provide information in Russian when a person asks for it, where the old text required them to give it in both languages. Officials said the change would not disadvantage Russian speakers.

Who lives in Kazakhstan now

The 2021 census, as the presidential office reports it, counted Kazakhs at 70.4% of the population and Russians at 15.5%, followed by Uzbeks at 3.2%, Ukrainians at 2%, Uyghurs at 1.5%, Germans at 1.2% and Tatars at 1.1%, with Azerbaijanis, Koreans, Turks, Dungans, Belarusians, Tajiks, Kurds, Poles, Kyrgyz and Chechens each under 1%. The Bureau of National Statistics figures cited by the OSCE in 2026 put Kazakhs at 71.3% and Russians at 14.6%.

Many of the smaller groups arrived by deportation. Koreans moved from the Russian Far East in 1937 are known as Koryo-saram. Volga Germans, Chechens and Meskhetian Turks were sent in the 1930s and 1940s. About a million Germans lived in Kazakhstan before 1991, and most left for Germany after the Soviet Union ended; most Pontic Greeks left for Greece. Ethnic Kazakhs have moved the other way, from China, Mongolia and Russia.

How Kazakhs keep track of lineage

Kinship still organises identity. Many Kazakhs know which of the three zhuz, the Great, Middle and Little Hordes, and which tribe they belong to. The historian Nurbulat Masanov records that customary law expected every Kazakh to know their ancestors back seven generations, a norm called jeti ata, and ideally forty. Family genealogies, shezhire, carry those lines, and a 2021 genetic study found that the western Kazakh tribes of the Alshyn alliance share a common male ancestor of about 650 years ago, matching the figure their genealogies name. The zhuz and the clans were never working organisations of government.

What faith and custom look like

The 2021 census recorded 69.3% of the population as Muslim, 17.2% as Christian, 2.25% as atheist and 0.2% as following other religions, while 11.01% did not answer. Most Muslims are Sunni of the Hanafi school, and most Christians are Russian Orthodox. Britannica describes the Kazakhs' Islam during the long nomadic period as informal and permissive, and Soviet authorities suppressed religious life from the early 1920s until 1991. After independence hundreds of mosques and churches went up within a few years. The pre-Islamic faith of the steppe, Tengriism, has seen a revival.

The Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi at Turkestan, built on Timur's order from 1389 to 1405 over the grave of a 12th-century Sufi teacher, makes Turkestan a centre of pilgrimage. UNESCO links it to the spread of Islam in the region through the Sufi orders.

Household custom turns on guests and livestock. Older manners required a visitor to ask about the health of a man's animals before asking about his family. Konakasy is the duty to feed and lodge a guest. At a celebration shashu showers sweets over the people at its centre, and an elder gives bata, a spoken blessing. Korimdik is a gift made on first seeing a new daughter-in-law or a newborn animal; when the good fortune is material, the gift is called baygazy. Betashar, a traditional wedding ritual, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2024. Nauryz, the spring new year, is kept on 21 to 23 March and was inscribed with the shared Novruz tradition in 2024.

How the steppe's music and poetry survived

Kazakh literature was spoken before it was written. Two kinds of performer carried it: the zhyrau, who passed on epics and didactic verse, and the akyn, who composed and improvised. Aitys, a public contest of improvised verse between two akyns, was a way to voice public opinion and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2015. Written literature took modern form in the second half of the 19th century with Abai Qunanbayuli, whose verse laid the basis of the literary language. Britannica dates the first written poetic forms to the 18th century, when Russian outposts rose along the northern edge of the plains, and the first prose and drama to the early 20th.

That generation did not survive Soviet rule. Ahmet Baitursynuly, editor of the newspaper Qazaq, led modern Kazakh writing before 1920 with Alikhan Bokeikhanov and Mirzhakyp Dulatuly and later Magzhan Zhumabayev; all of them disappeared into Soviet prisons in Stalin's purges, which destroyed much of the Kazakh intelligentsia. Mukhtar Auezov, an early Soviet Kazakh writer, survived to write a long novel, Abai, on the poet's life, and plays including Enlik-Kebek.

The dombra, a plucked lute with two strings, carries the instrumental tradition. Its pieces, kuy, are played solo and usually tell a story named in the title; the art of the dombra kuy was inscribed by UNESCO in 2014. The kobyz, a bowed instrument played on the knees, is the other old instrument. Kurmangazy Sagyrbayuly, a 19th-century dombra player and composer, gave his name to the national orchestra of folk instruments and to the conservatoire in Almaty. Gaziza Zhubanova, who studied in Moscow, became the first Kazakh woman to compose classical music, and in the Soviet years the singer Roza Rymbaeva was known across the union. The band Urker plays ethno-rock that mixes rock with traditional Kazakh music.

Soviet rule reorganised this music. From 1920 Aleksandr Zatayevich wrote art music on Kazakh melodies, and from 1928 he adapted the folk instruments for Russian-style ensembles by adding frets and strings. Kazakh musicians first wrote their own music in notation in 1931, and by the 1930s the orchestral style had become the official form of Kazakh performance. Orteke, a traditional performing art in which a puppet dances to music, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2022.

What a Kazakh meal is built on

The cooking comes from herding fat-tailed sheep, Bactrian camels and horses, and from the need to keep food through the year: meat is salted and dried, and soured milk keeps better than fresh. A traditional dinner opens with appetisers and a soup and goes on to pilaf or beshbarmak, boiled horse meat or lamb served over sheets of boiled dough with a broth called shorpa. Qazy and shuzhuk are horse meat sausages, and kuyrdak is roasted offal.

Milk is drunk fermented, as ayran, shubat and kymyz; kymyz, fermented mare's milk, counts as the national drink. Black tea with milk is served with dried fruit and nuts, and in the southern provinces people more often drink green tea. The making and sharing of flatbread was inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 under a joint nomination. RECIPESpec is the sibling catalogue for the dishes themselves.

Which crafts and games are kept up

The yurt is the object that ties the rest together. Its frame is a flexible willow lattice covered in felt, with an open crown that lets out smoke from the hearth and a flap that controls the draught, and it can be put up or taken down in less than an hour. Inside, the right side was kept for men and the left for women. UNESCO inscribed the knowledge of making Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Karakalpak yurts in 2025. Felt rugs, koshma, and Kazakh-made carpets still furnish houses.

Traditional dress was cut from what the herds gave: wool and hides, leather and fur. The shapan is a long coat of broadcloth or velvet over a wool or cotton lining, its collar and cuffs embroidered with Kazakh motifs. The tymaq is a man's hat, light and edged with lambskin in summer, thick felt and fox fur in winter. Britannica notes that urban Kazakhs of both sexes dress in modern clothes, while women in remote villages still wear traditional dresses and head scarves.

Kazakhstan has 14 elements on UNESCO's lists of intangible heritage, several shared with neighbours, and three more nominations were in progress in 2026, among them Salburyn, an equestrian festival with tazy hounds and hunting birds, and traditional felt making.

What Kazakh cinema and sport have won

The film industry is run through the state-owned Kazakhfilm studios in Almaty. In September 2006 the government funded the distribution of Nomad, a costly film of the nation's history begun in 2003. Tulpan won the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2008, and the annual Eurasia International Film Festival is held in the country. Painting in the European sense began under Russian teachers in the late 19th century, and the State Museum of Art was renamed in 1984 after Abilkhan Kasteyev, a pupil of Nikolai Khludov.

Theatres in the cities stage Uyghur, Korean and Russian musicals alongside opera and ballet, and the national opera and philharmonic are state companies.

Kazakhstan has been especially successful in Olympic boxing. A professional road cycling team from Astana rides the Tour de France, football and ice hockey have national leagues, and the bandy team has taken bronze at the world championship several times. Astana and Almaty hosted the Asian Winter Games in 2011, Almaty bid twice for the Winter Olympics, and in 2026 Mikhail Shaidorov won the men's figure skating at the Winter Olympics. Kazakhstan: history covers how the deportations and the famine shaped the population, and Kazakhstan: travel where the mausoleum and the steppe can be seen.