Kazakh language
Where is the Kazakh language primarily spoken?
What is agglutination in the Kazakh language?
What scripts have been used to write Kazakh?
Kazakh language, member of the Turkic language family within the Altaic language group, belonging to the northwestern, or Kipchak, branch. The Kazakh language is spoken primarily in Kazakhstan and in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, but it is also found in Uzbekistan, Mongolia, and Afghanistan. The so-called Kipchak-Uzbek dialect is closely related to Kazakh and is considered by some to be a Kazakh dialect (its speakers, however, use the Uzbek literary language). See also Turkic languages.
Linguistic structure
Like other Turkic languages, Kazakh is an agglutinative language—that is, one characterized by agglutination, a grammatical process in which words are composed of a sequence of morphemes (meaningful word elements), each of which represents not more than a single grammatical category. In Kazakh, suffixes are added onto stems to create new meanings. The most common type of suffix in Kazakh is an inflectional suffix. These suffixes carry grammatical meanings, such as marking plurality, possession, or case on nouns and indicating tense and negation on verbs. Less common are derivational suffixes, which create words with new meanings from other words. For example, the Kazakh word jūmysshy (Cyrillic: жұмысшы; ‘worker’) is created by adding the -shy (Cyrillic: -шы) suffix to the word jūmys (Cyrillic: жұмыс; ‘work’), in the same way that adding the English derivational suffix -er creates the word worker from work.
The Kazakh language has both vowel harmony and consonant assimilation. Vowel harmony in Kazakh, as in Turkish, is based on a distinction between front vowels (ӓ, ö, ü, ı, e, і [Cyrillic: ә, ө, ү, і, е, и]) and back vowels (a, o, ū, u, y [Cyrillic: а, о, ұ, у, ы]). The vowels of suffixes vary according to whether the final vowel of the stem is a front or back vowel. Consonant assimilation means that suffixes also have variants with different beginning consonants. The form used in a given situation is based on the final consonant (or lack thereof) of the stem.
In terms of syntax, Kazakh follows a subject–object–verb (SOV) word order in most cases, although subject–verb–object and object–verb–subject orders may be used to emphasize certain information. Subordinate clauses generally precede the main clause and utilize verbal nouns, verbal adjectives (participles), and verbal adverbs (converbs), rather than conjunctions or relative pronouns as in English. Similarly, relative clauses are formed with verbal participles and precede the noun or phrase they modify. Questions that can be answered with yes or no are constructed by adding a question particle to the sentence, whereas other interrogative sentences are made by using question words (e.g., ne [не] ‘what,’ qaida [қайда] ‘where,’ and qalay [қалай] ‘how’).
- Also spelled:
- Kazak
- Related Topics:
- Kazakh literature
- Northwestern Turkic languages
Script
In the 6th–8th centuries ce Turkic-speaking peoples used their own writing system, known as the Kök Turki alphabet (or Kök Turki runes, given the characters’ resemblance to those of the Germanic runic alphabet). It was eventually replaced by the Arabic alphabet as Islam spread into the region. The script was adapted and used for Kazakh until the 20th century. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Kazakh was written in Yanalif, a form of Latin script modified for Turkic languages. However, it was switched to Cyrillic script about two decades later as Soviet leadership switched from a policy of Latinization to one of Cyrillization. In 2017 Kazakhstan began transitioning back to writing Kazakh in a Latin script with a reformed system of spelling. In 2023 initial drafts of the new alphabet and spelling rules were created.