The Kazakh language reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Kazakh language

Kazakh, also Qazaq (Қазақ тілі, Qazaq tili) is a Turkic language with ISO 639 codes of kaz and kk.

It is one of the official languages of Kazakhstan, and is also spoken traditionally in Afghanistan, China, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Germany has some Kazakh speakers in the second half of the 20th century and onward.

There are approximately 6.5 million native speakers around the world. It is written using the Cyrillic, the Latin (Turkey), and modified Arabic (China, Iran, Afghanistan) scripts.

The Kazakh Cyrillic script is basically the Russian alphabet with 9 additional letters: Әә, Ғғ, Ққ, Ңң, Өө, Ұұ, Үү, Һһ, Іі.

See also: Kazakh, Languages of China

This is the "Kazakh language" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.