Kazakh or Qazaq is a Turkic language spoken in Kazakhstan, Russia and China by about 8 million people. Kazakh was first written with the Arabic script during the 19th century when a number of poets, educated in Islamic schools, incited revolt against Russia. Russia's response was to set up secular schools and devise a way of writing Kazakh with the Cyrillic alphabet, which was not widely accepted. By 1917, the Arabic script was reintroduced, even in schools and local government. In 1927, Kazakh nationalist movement sprang up but was soon suppressed. At the same time the Arabic script was banned and the Latin alphabet was imposed for writing Kazakh. The Latin alphabet was in turn replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in 1940.
Kazakh Pronunciation
One notable aspect of Kazakh pronunciation is the system of vowel harmony. All Kazakh vowels can be classified as either front vowels or back vowels. In the Kazakh language, if the stem of a word contains a front vowel, then any suffixes for that word must also use a front vowel. Likewise, if there is a back vowel in the stem of a word, back vowels are used in any suffixes for that word. The only exceptions to this pronunciation rule are a few loan words from other languages.
Most Kazakh words are stressed on the final syllable.
Kazakh Vocabulary
Kazakh vocabulary shares a number of words with the related languages in the Turkic language family. It also has a variety of loan words from other languages, most notably Russian. By some estimates, Kazakh has been more heavily influenced by Russian than any other Turkic language.
Kazakh Grammar
Kazakh is considered an agglutinative language because it indicates grammatical functions primarily by attaching suffixes to word stems. Kazakh nouns decline to show case, meaning that they change form to indicate their role in a sentence. The six noun cases in Kazakh are the nominative case, the genitive case, the dative case, the accusative case, the locative case, and the ablative case. Nouns also take suffixes to indicate when they are plural. Kazakh verbs take suffixes to indicate their tense, aspect, and mood.
The typical word order for a Kazakh sentence is Subject-Object-Verb, which is different from that of English. Kazakh also uses postpositions, which come after the words they apply to, in place of prepositions, which come before them.
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