Kazakh language
History

The Kipchak branch of Turkic languages, which Kazakh is borne out of, was mainly solidified during the reign of the Golden Horde. The modern Kazakh language is said to have originated in approximately 1465 AD during the formation of the Kazakh Khanate. Modern Kazakh is likely a descendant of both Chagatay Turkic as spoken by the Timurids and Kipchak Turkic as spoken in the Golden Horde.

Kazakh uses a high volume of loanwords from Persian and Arabic due to the frequent historical interactions between Kazakhs and Iranian ethnic groups to the south. Additionally, Persian was a lingua franca in the Kazakh Khanate, which allowed Kazakhs to mix Persian words into their own spoken and written vernacular. Meanwhile, Arabic was used by Kazakhs in mosques and mausoleums, serving as a language exclusively for religious contexts, similar to how Latin served as a liturgical language in the European cultural sphere.

The Kazakhs used the Arabic script to write their language until approximately 1929. In the early 1900s, Kazakh activist Akhmet Baitursynuly reformed the Kazakh-Arabic alphabet, but his work was largely overshadowed by the Soviet presence in Central Asia. At that point, the new Soviet regime forced the Kazakhs to use a Latin script, and then a Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Today, Kazakhs use the Cyrillic and Latin scripts to write their language, although a presidential decree from 2017 ordered the transition from Cyrillic to Latin by 2031.
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