Kazakh · Қазақша

About Kazakh

Language family

Turkic, Kipchak branch

Where it's spoken

Kazakhstan, with communities in China, Mongolia, and Russia

Speakers

roughly 13–16 million speakers

Kazakh belongs to the Kipchak branch of Turkic languages, closest to Kyrgyz and Tatar, reflecting the shared nomadic steppe history of these peoples across Central Asia. It has gone through several script changes in the last century — Arabic, then Latin, then Cyrillic under Soviet policy — and is now in the middle of an officially planned transition back to a Latin-based alphabet. Historically a language of nomadic pastoralists organized into clan-based hordes, Kazakh carries a strong oral tradition of epic poetry and improvised verse contests (aitys) still practiced today.