Kazakh language

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

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

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. Other sizeable 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 are newly immigrated (in the second half of the 20th century) descendants of Volga Germans who were deported to Kazakhstan.

Writing system

Related predecessors to Kazakh were written in the Orkhon script, containing 24 letters. Modern Kazakh can be written using modified versions of the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts. The names of the Kazakh letters are derived mostly from their corresponding names in the Arabic alphabet.

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.

Consonants

The following chart depicts the consonant inventory of Kazakh; many of the sounds, however, are allophones of other sounds or appear only in recently 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. Allophones and borrowed sounds are in Roman.

caption | Consonant inventory of Kazakh
	Bilabial		Labio- dental		Dental		Alveolar		Post- alveolar		Palatal		Velar		Uvular		Glottal
Plosives
Nasals
Fricatives
Affricates
Tap
Approximant
Lateral approximants

, , , , only occur in recent borrowings, mostly from Russian.

The following can be argued not to be distinct phonemes, due to their distribution in front versus back vowel contexts:

Front	Back

In addition, the following alternations are the result of lenition between vowels:

V_V	Elsewhere

Vowels

While the three "diphthongoid" vowels can be said to be phonetically composed of other elements in the language, 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.

	front		back
	-rd	+rd	-rd	+rd
+high
-high
-high

Generally the vowels , , , , and don't phonemically occur in any syllable but the first of the word; the rounded variants often occur after the first syllable as allophones of unrounded vowels, caused by rounding harmony to a rounded vowel in the first syllable.

Morphology and Syntax

Pronouns

Kazakh has six personal pronouns:

Personal pronouns
Singular		Plural
Kazakh (transliteration)	English	Kazakh (transliteration)	English
Мен (Men)	I	Біз (Biz)	We
Сен (Sen)	You (singular informal)	Сендер (Sender)	You (plural informal)
Сіз (Siz)	You (singular formal)	Сіздер (Sizder)	You (plural formal)
Ол (Ol)	He/She/It	Олар (Olar)	They

References

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

External links

Turkic languages | Languages of Asia | Languages of China | Languages of Kazakhstan | Vowel harmony languages

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