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This week, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev met with officials responsible for shepherding the Kazakh language from its present Cyrillic script into a Latin alphabet. As reported by RFE/RL, Tokayev asked “Culture Minister Aqtoty Raiymqulova and Education Minister Askhat Aimaghambetov to work with experts on the alphabet and present their work to a national commission working on the issue.”
In Kazakhstan, the matter of how the nation’s language is written has historical, cultural, and practical dimensions. Through time, the Kazakh language has undergone various transformations often occurring aside political changes. The language itself belongs to a branch of the larger Turkic language tree and is spoken by Kazakhs in Central Asia, China, Afghanistan, and Iran, in addition to some of the global Kazakh diaspora.