Kazakh language
Encyclopedia : K : KA : KAZ : 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.
| Bilabial | Labio-dental | Dental | Alveolar | Post-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | ||||||||||||||||||
| Nasals | m | n | ŋ | ɴ | ||||||||||||||
| Fricatives | ||||||||||||||||||
| Affricates | ||||||||||||||||||
| Tap | ɾ | |||||||||||||||||
| Approximant | w | j | ||||||||||||||||
| Lateralapproximants | ɫ | l | ||||||||||||||||
f, v, ɕ, tɕ, x 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 | wʉ | ɑ | wʊ | |
Morphology and Syntax
Pronouns
Kazakh has six 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
- [Kazak language, alphabet, and pronunciation]
- [Forum in Kazakh Language Suhbat.com]
- [Roman-Cyrillic characters converter for Kazakh alphabets]
- [Introductory Kazakh course (in Russian)]
- [Language Reference Guide for Kazakh]
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