Kazakh

What the Golden Horde left in it

The Kipchak branch was largely consolidated under the Golden Horde, and modern Kazakh probably descends from both the Kipchak Turkic of the Horde and the Chagatay Turkic of the Timurids. Persian was a lingua franca in the Kazakh Khanate and left many loanwords, while Arabic stayed in mosques and mausoleums as a religious language, much as Latin did in western Europe. Ethnologue counts three mutually intelligible dialect groups, and the North-Eastern one underlies the standard.

Which alphabets came and went

Kazakh was written in Arabic script until about 1929. Akhmet Baitursynuly reformed the Kazakh Arabic alphabet in the early 1900s, but Soviet rule brought first a Latin alphabet and then, in the 1940s, Cyrillic. The Latin alphabet planned since 2017 was revised several times; by January 2021 it was close to the Turkish one, without c and ç but with ä, ñ, q and ū. Over a million Kazakh speakers in Xinjiang write a modified Perso-Arabic script.

How harmony changes the pronunciation

Suffixes follow tongue-root vowel harmony, and a weaker rounding harmony that spelling does not show. So jūldyz, star, is pronounced jūldūz, and ülken, big, sounds as ülkön. Urban speakers often break the rounding rule and pronounce Russian loanwords against it. Words stress the last syllable, but numbers used for counting stress the first: bır, ekı, üş.

Where Kazakh speakers live outside Kazakhstan

The territory runs from the Tian Shan to the western shore of the Caspian. Russia's 2010 census counted some 472,000 Kazakhs, and nearly two million ethnic Kazakhs live in China's Ili prefecture. There are communities in Germany and Turkey too. In 2024 the language was described officially as somewhat vulnerable, because speaker numbers were not growing as fast as expected.