Kazakh language

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Kazakh, also Kazak, Qazaq, Khazakh, Kosach, and Kaisak (Қазақ тілі in Cyrillic, Qazaq tili in the Latin alphabet, and قازاق ڌﻳل in the Arabic alphabet) is a Western Turkic language closely related to Kyrgyz, Nogai and Karakalpak.

Kazakh is an agglutinative language, and it employs vowel harmony.

[edit] Geographic distribution

Kazakh is the official state language of Kazakhstan, along with Russian, the official language of commerce. In Kazakhstan, nearly 10 million speakers are reported (based on CIA World Factbook's estimates for population and percentage of Kazakh speakers). Another million or more speakers reside in China. Russian Census (2002) reported 560,000 Kazakh speakers in Russia. Other sizable populations of Kazakh speakers live in Mongolia (fewer than 200,000). Smaller numbers exist elsewhere in Central Asia and the former Soviet Union, and in Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and other countries. There are also some Kazakh speakers in Germany. They immigrated from Turkey in the 1970s.

Population statistics from the 2000 census data show that Kazakhs in China mostly live in the northern parts of the Xinjiang region.

[edit] Writing system

Main article: Kazakh alphabet

Related predecessors to Kazakh were written in the Orkhon script, containing 24 letters. Modern Kazakh has historically been written using versions of the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts.

Today, Kazakh is written in Cyrillic in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, while the more than one million Kazakh-speakers in China use an Arabic-derived script similar to that used to write Uyghur.

In October of 2006, Nursultan Nazarbaev, the president of Kazakhstan, brought up the topic of using the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet as the official script for Kazakh in Kazakhstan^{[2] [3]}.

[edit] Phonology

Kazakh exhibits front-back vowel harmony, with some words of recent foreign origin as exceptions. There is also a system of rounding harmony which resembles that of Kyrgyz, but which doesn't apply as strongly and isn't reflected in the orthography.

[edit] Consonants

The following chart depicts the consonant inventory of Kazakh; many of the sounds, however, are allophones of other sounds or appear only in recent loan-words. The 18 consonant phonemes listed by Vajda are in bold—since these are phonemes, their listed place and manner of articulation are very general, and will vary from what's shown. The borrowed phonemes f, v, ɕ, ʨ and x, only occur in recent mostly Russian borrowings, and are shown in parentheses ( ) in the table below.

In the table, the elements left of a divide are voiceless, whilst those to the right are voiced.

[edit] Vowels

Kazakh has a system of nine phonemic vowels, which are shown in the table below. Three of these are phonetically diphthongs; however, Vajda argues that this has no phonemic bearing, and that they are in fact not phonemically composed of the elements which make them up, but are instead one phonemic element. The rounding contrast and /æ/ generally only occur as phonemes in the first syllable of a word, but do occur later allophonically; see the section on harmony below for more information.

[edit] Morphology and Syntax

Kazakh is generally verb-final, though various permutations on SOV word order can be used. Verbal and nominal morphology in Kazakh exists almost exclusively in the form of agglutinative suffixes.

[edit] Case

Kazakh has 7 cases. The endings outlined in the chart below are applied to a word ending in a front vowel, a word ending in a back vowel, a word ending in each of those with a voiced consonant, and a word ending with each of this and an unvoiced consonant.

[edit] Pronouns

Kazakh has six personal pronouns:

The declension of the pronouns is outlined in the following chart. Singular pronouns (with the exception of сіз, which used to be plural) exhibit irregularities, while plural pronouns don't. Irregular forms are highlighted in bold.

[edit] Tense/Aspect/Mood

Kazakh may express different combinations of tense, aspect, and mood through the use of various verbal morphology or through a system of auxiliary verbs, many of which might better be considered light verbs. For example, the (imperfect) present tense in Kazakh bears different aspectual information depending on whether basic present-tense morphology is used, or one of (commonly) four verbs is used:

[edit] Evidentiality

Kazakh exhibits a two-way evidentiality system which does not neatly align with morphological paradigms.

[edit] References

1. ^ "Ethnologue report for Altaic"
2. ^ Kazakhstan switching to Latin alphabet
3. ^ Kazakh President Revives Idea Of Switching To Latin Script

• This language's entry in the Ethnologue.
• Kazakhstan in the CIA World Factbook

[edit] External links

Kazakh language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Kazak language, alphabet, and pronunciation
• Forum in Kazakh Language Suhbat.com
• Roman-Cyrillic characters converter for Kazakh alphabets
• Gaspirali Another converter
• Aliya S. Kuzhabekova, "Past, Present and Future of Language Policy in Kazakhstan" (M.A. thesis, University of North Dakota, 2003)