Kazakh
From UniLang Wiki
The Kazakh language is a member of the Turkic language family. Kazakh is a member of the so-called Kipchak subgroup of the Turkic family. These languages are characterized, in distinction to other Turkic languages, by the presence of /s/ in place of reconstructed proto-Turkic */š/ and /š/ in place of */ç/; further, Kazakh has /j/ (alveodental affricate) where other Turkic languages have /y/ (glide).
It is the official language of Kazakhstan, and is also spoken traditionally in Afghanistan, China, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Germany has some Kazak speakers in the second half of the 20th century and onward. These are mainly descendants of the Volga Germans who were deported to Kazakstan, mixed with the local population and later returned to Germany.
There are approximately 8.5 million native speakers around the world. It is written using the Cyrillic, the Latin (Turkey), and modified Arabic (China, Iran, Afghanistan) scripts.
Kazakh, like most Turkic languages lacks phonemic vowel length, and as such there is no distinction between long and short vowels.
Before 1917, Kazakh was written in the Arabic alphabet. Between 1917 and 1926 it was written with a modified version of the Latin alphabet similar to that used for Republican Turkish. Since 1926 it has been written in a variant of the Cyrillic script with extra characters to represent phonemes not present in Russian (Ә, Ғ, Қ, Ң, Ө, Ұ, Ү, Һ, І.).
