Kazakh language

Kazakh (Qazaq tili, Қазақ тілі, قازاق ٴتىلى ‎;) is a Turkic language closely related to Kyrgyz and Karakalpak. It is an agglutinative language. Speakers of Kazakh (mainly Kazakhs) are spread over a vast territory from the Tian Shan mountains to the Ural mountains. It is spoken by approximately 12 million people.

Kazakh is the official state language of Kazakhstan, where nearly 10 million speakers are reported to live. More than a million speakers reside in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The 2002 Russian Census reported 560,000 Kazakh speakers in Russia. Other sizable populations of Kazakh speakers live in Mongolia, Uzbekistan, the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and other countries.

Kazakh is written in the Cyrillic alphabet in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, while Kazakh speakers in China use an Arabic-derived script similar to that used to write Uyghur. The oldest known records of languages closely related to Kazakh were written in the Orkhon script. However, modern Kazakh is written using versions of the Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts. In October 2006, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev talked about using the Latin alphabet as the official script for Kazakh in Kazakhstan. However, in December 2007, President Nazarbayev decided not to transform the script.

Kazhak has no definite or indefinite articles. All Kazakh words are classified into nouns and verbs. It has 7 cases. Case endings are applied only to the last element of a noun phrase or a nominalised verb phrase. It has eight personal pronouns. Singular pronouns exhibit irregularities. There is no gender in Kazhakh.

Info: Wikipedia