The alphabet in Kazakhstan — which one?
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They were already talking about this when I was in Kazakhstan twenty years ago.
The ABC of alphabet reform in Kazakhstan
Moving from Cyrillic-based to modified Latin script will distance the central Asian state symbolically from Russia
By Tony Barber, Financial Times (7/3/23)
——
It took only a few hours after my arrival in Astana, Kazakhstan’s futuristic capital, to appreciate the immense changes since my first visit to the country 36 years ago. Most obviously, Kazakhstan was no longer the drab central Asian outpost of a drab communist empire ruled from Moscow. But what caught my eye most was the young man with one word on his T-shirt: “Qazaqstan.”
How to spell the country’s name, and which alphabet to use for the Kazakh language, are questions of the highest political sensitivity. Cautiously, the government is preparing to replace the Cyrillic-based alphabet used for Kazakh since Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship with a modified Latin alphabet. Some Kazakhs already spell their country’s name as they would like it in Latin script — Qazaqstan.
The new alphabet is still under discussion, and the switch is unlikely to be fully in place until the 2030s. But the symbolism of the reform is clear. The Cyrillic script derives from Russian and is a reminder of Kazakhstan’s long, sometimes horrifically violent history under Soviet rule. The Latin script will place Kazakhstan alongside western countries, not to mention other Turkic-language states that have adopted that alphabet.
Some Kazakhs would like the reform to proceed faster. Qazaqshajaz (“Write in Kazakh”), an online movement, puts pressure on companies that use only Russian on social networks to post the same content in Kazakh. But the authorities are taking their time. “The use of Kazakh is increasing every year. So there is no reason to worry,” President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said last year.
Tearing oneself away from the apron strings of мать Россия will not be so easy as one might have thought.
Selected readings
- "Kazakhstan goes Latin" (9/20/17)
- "Kazakh" (12/12/14)
- "Cossack and Kazakh" (2/27/20)
- "Apostrophosis" (1/16/18)
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
Jongseong Park said,
July 13, 2023 @ 1:39 am
From the title I thought this was going to be about all the different versions of the Latin alphabet for Kazakh that have been proposed. There have been so many changes since the initial proposals in 2017 (not even counting the versions introduced in Soviet times before the switch to Cyrillic) that I have lost count. At least, they seem to have settled on the final version as of the latest revision of April 2021. I'm glad that they abandoned the use of ý for Cyrillic у /w, ʊw, ʏw, o̞w/, though the use of ı for Cyrillic і /ɪ/ instead of ы /ɤ̞/ will take a bit of getting used to.
Taylor, Philip said,
July 13, 2023 @ 3:17 am
I have always assumed that the "h" in "Kazakhstan" is an indication that the second (medial) "k" is aspirated while the first (initial) "k" is not (and have therefore always pronounced it as such). If this is the case, how is one intended to deduce the same fact from the proposed spelling "Qazaqstan" ?
And if this is not the case, what does the "h" in the traditional spelling signify ?
Taylor, Philip said,
July 13, 2023 @ 3:19 am
(apologies for the unintended <br> in the preceding).
Jongseong Park said,
July 13, 2023 @ 4:50 am
"Kazakh" is romanized from Russian Казах, where the "kh" stands for Cyrillic х which is a fricative [x], not an aspirated "k" sound. As you can see from "Cossack and Kazakh" linked to above, the story goes that it became a convention to spell Qazaq as Казах with a х at the end to distinguish the name from Cossack (Казак).
The q in the Kazakh language itself is normally aspirated ([qʰ]), as is common in Turkic languages. If anything, you will normally hear the aspiration of the initial q in Qazaqstan but not of the second q as it is directly followed by s.
pete said,
July 13, 2023 @ 5:00 am
@Philip Taylor
That's an artifact of the Russian-language name of the country Казахстан, where transliterated 'kh' is [x].
In the Kazakh language written in Cyrillic the name of the country is Қазақстан, where қ represents [q] in both cases.
A. Barmazel said,
July 13, 2023 @ 6:33 am
It's ironic that after striking a huge batch of coins marked "Qazaqstan Respýblıkasy" in 2019, they changed the official spelling of the country's name to an even more bizarre Respwblıkasy, then reverted to Respublikasy as originally proposed in 2017.
I suppose that in the nearest future, they will have coins with all three spellings (incl. Cyrillic) in concurrent use.
Victor Mair said,
July 13, 2023 @ 6:45 am
Google on
stop the train i want to get off
for some good music on the theme of misguided "progress".
David Marjanović said,
July 13, 2023 @ 10:49 am
Wikipedia has a whole article on the entire confusion.
Uh, that's about the language, not the script. Most ethnic Kazakhs, especially in the cities, are native speakers of Russian these days and don't understand Kazakh very well.
It represents /q/ in both cases, but the second one is an allophonic [χ]. That's what the Russians picked up on.
Back to the article:
Stalin's choice of Cyrillic derives from Russian, and a number of Kazakh Cyrillic spelling conventions (including entire letters) derives from Russian. But there would be ways to derussianize all that. Funnily enough, the Soviet Cyrillic alphabet of Azerbaijani offers a model for this: it looks more Serbian than Russian. And Bulgaria is an EU and NATO member…
Peter B. Golden said,
July 13, 2023 @ 11:30 am
Russian казах, Казахстан were created to distinguish the Qazaqs from the Cossacks (казаки). The decision was more political than philological. "Cossack" is the English version of Kazak (Russ. Казак, Ukrainian: Козак ) which derives from the Turkic term "qazaq" "freebooter, raider, brigand" etc. The etymology of "qazaq" has long been under discussion. An interesting explanation has been offered by Patrick Lewis, "On the Sociolinguistic Origins of the term 'Qazaq': A Proposal for an Alternative Etymology of 'Cossack'/'Kazakh' and an Argument for the Analytical Usefulness of Register in Historical Linguistics" in Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 76/1 (March, 2023): 93-128. Lewis suggests that it stems from Turk. 'qačaq" "runaway, fugitive" which became "qazaq (<qasaq) in Middle Oghuric (Middle Chuvash) and was borrowed back into Qïpchaq Turkic as "Qazaq." The theory has a few questions. I would recommend reading the full article. On the the institution of "qazaqlïlïq" (and Cossack) read Joo-Yup Lee's excellent monograph, "Qazaqlïq or Ambitious Brigandage, and the Formation of the Qazaqs: State and Identity in post-Mongol Central Eurasia" (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
cliff arroyo said,
July 13, 2023 @ 2:29 pm
"all the different versions of the Latin alphabet for Kazakh that have been proposed"
The thing is they had a perfectly serviceable system long before 2017 (on the Kazakh state news agency page) similar to but distinct from Turkish… why they couldn't use that if they want to switch to a romanized system is not clear to me.
Interestingly a little over a year ago I had a group of Kazakh exchange students in a class. Very interesting and interested in the world. They all knew russian but were sort of… over it and anxious and impatient for use of Kazakh to expand in more domains. They mostly didn't seem to care much about romanization and thought cyrillic was fine (there's no way to confuse the two languages in cyrillic if you know even the barest basics of either).
Interestingly they said they could understand spoken Turkish (watched tv series in Turkish with no translation) but couldn't read it….
My very, very cynical side wonders if the constant changes about romanization are actually intended to impede the progress of the language… If I were a ruler who wanted to preserve a colonial language then causing as much unnecessary confusion about a competitor by constantly fiddling with the writing system isn't the worst strategy….
Christopher J. Henrich said,
July 13, 2023 @ 4:44 pm
My very, very cynical side wonders if the constant changes about romanization are actually intended to impede the progress of the language…
It really sounds to me like the results of enthusiasm spiced with fecklessness.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 16, 2023 @ 3:28 pm
Late to this thread, but … the modern Latin-script-based alphabet for Turkish does not contain the letter Q, and I read on the internet that "In Turkey the use of the letter Q was banned between 1928 and 2013. This constituted a problem for the Kurdish population in Turkey as the letter was a part of the Kurdish alphabet." Kazakh, while a Turkic language, has slightly different phonology than Turkish and apparently does contain what IPA notation would have as a /q/ consonant as well as a /k/ consonant. But some internet sources (I do not claim personal expertise here) say that they're allophones, with /q/ appearing before back vowels and /k/ in all other environments. In which case there is no actual need to distinguish them orthographically. Indeed, Turkish apparently uses the "K" glyph to represent the allophones /c/ and /k/ without distinguishing between them orthographically, because native speakers know from phonotactic context which allophone goes where.
In any event, I blame the Etruscans and then the Romans for retaining the "Q" glyph from the set they had indirectly inherited from Semitic predecessors despite the fact that "Q" did not represent a distinct sound but merely represented the /k/ sound when found in the /kw/ cluster. Our hearty Anglo-Saxon forefathers felt no need for such a superfluous glyph, e.g. spelling what we have as "queen" as the more straightforward "cwēn." But then the cultural prestige of Latin led to a slavish adoption of its regrettable orthographic redundancies. Meaning that non-IE languages with sound systems very different from Latin could seize on a redundant Latin glyph to represent some sound not found in Latin, confusing all concerned, and creating opportunities for mischief by bad actors like the CCP. The Cyrillic approach (where you make up a new glyph to represent sounds not found in the core-Cyrillic-scripted languages) seems more helpful.
cliff arroyo said,
July 17, 2023 @ 8:26 am
"Kazakh, while a Turkic language, has slightly different phonology than Turkish and apparently does contain what IPA notation would have as a /q/ "
IINM q was used or proposed for use in Turkish at one point, but not for a post-velar sound but for the palatalized k in the rare cases where it occurs beofre back vowels (think of the name of the letter q and see it's use in Albanian).
But the decision was apparently it mostly wasn't needed (or using the circumflex on the vowel was enough though that's certainly used on a hit or miss basis…. usually miss.)
David Marjanović said,
July 17, 2023 @ 2:33 pm
Turkic /k g/ participate in vowel harmony: they used to be [k g] in front-vowel words ( < without retracted tongue root) and [q ʁ] in back-vowel words ( < with retracted tongue root). This is more or less intact for native words in most Turkic languages today. However, all of them have, by now, enough loans that violate vowel harmony (from Persian, Arabic, Russian and/or French mostly) that the distinction has become phonemic. That's what the Latin letter Q and the Cyrillic letter Қ (note the tail!) are for.
Turkish has lost this completely.
Parts of it have developed a new allophony, with [k g] in back-vowel words and [kʲ gʲ] in front-vowel words, like parts of neighboring Greek. Apparently this new system is now marginally phonemic at least for some speakers…