At the end of last month Kazakhstan's ageing authoritarian President Nursultan Nazarbayev created a stir when he ordered officials to speak in the state language, Kazakh, rather than the country's ...

ALMATY – Growing up in Esil, a predominantly Russian-speaking town in northern Kazakhstan, Aleksei Skalozubov didn’t feel the need to speak Kazakh, the country’s state language. The situation didn’t ...

During the service at Almaty’s Ascension Cathedral, strains of Church Slavic rise from the choir. “Lord have mercy,” they sing in the proto-Russian language still used in the Orthodox Church. As the ...

It has been 10 years since Kazakhstan adopted a law that enshrined Kazakh as the state language, and required all citizens to learn it. A decade later, major challenges continue to hamper efforts to ...

Kazakhstan’s planned transition to a Latin alphabet is intertwined with issues of national identity, geopolitical shifts, and post-colonial discourse. In Kazakhstan, talk about switching from the ...

The ongoing switch from Cyrillic to a Latin-based alphabet in Kazakhstan has been widely presented as a step toward modernization and global integration by Kazakh officials. However, in Russian media, ...