Languages of Kazakhstan

Languages of Kazakhstan
The Kazakh-speaking world:   regions where Kazakh is the language of the majority   regions where Kazakh is the language of a significant minority or sparsely populated areas
Official	Kazakh (national/state language), Russian (official)
National	Kazakh language
Minority	Kazakh; German; Uzbek; Ukrainian; Uyghur; Tatar; Kyrgyz; Azerbaijani; Korean;
Foreign	English, German
Signed	Kazakh Sign Language
Keyboard layout	ЙЦУКЕН The Kazakh keyboard.
Source	Languages committee of the Ministry of culture and Sports
Alphabet	Kazakh alphabets Kazakh Braille

Language proficiency by age group

Kazakhstan is officially a bilingual country. Kazakh (part of the Kipchak sub-branch of the Turkic languages) is proficiently spoken by 80.1% of the population according to 2021 census, and has the status of "state language". Russian, on the other hand, is spoken by 83.7% as of 2021. ^[1] It has a status of "official language", rather than the "state language" Kazakh, and is used routinely in business, government, and inter-ethnic communication. However, only 63.45% of ethnic Kazakhs and 49.3% of the country's population are daily speakers of Kazakh language, according to the same census. ^[2]

Other languages natively spoken in Kazakhstan are Dungan, Ili Turki, Ingush, Plautdietsch, and Sinte Romani. ^[3] A number of more recent immigrant languages, such as Belarusian, Korean, Azerbaijani, and Greek are also spoken. ^{[4] [5]}

Languages

The following table shows the share of the population that can speak the language according to the 2021 census  [ ru; kk ]: ^[6]

Language	%	Script
Russian	83.7	Cyrillic
Kazakh	80.1	Cyrillic, Latin
English	35.1	Latin
Uzbek	2.5	Latin, Cyrillic
Uyghur	0.9	Perso-Arabic, Latin
Turkish	0.6	Latin
German	0.6	Latin
Tatar	0.5	Cyrillic
Azerbaijani	0.5	Cyrillic, Latin, Perso-Arabic
Korean	0.3	Hangul
Kyrgyz	0.2	Cyrillic, Perso-Arabic
Belarusian	0.1	Cyrillic
Ukrainian	0.1	Cyrillic
Chinese	0.1	Chinese characters
Chechen	0.1	Cyrillic
French	0.1	Latin
Arabic	0.1	Arabic alphabet
Other	2.7	—

Percentage of daily Kazakh speakers in Kazakhstan (2021 Census)

See also

• Demographics of Kazakhstan

References

1. "National census 2021 – Agency for Strategic planning and reforms of the Republic of Kazakhstan Bureau of National statistics". stat.gov.kz. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
2. "Краткие итоги" [Brief summary] (in Russian). Archived from the original on 12 January 2024.
3. Higgins, Andrew (12 May 2019). "A Mennonite Town in Muslim Central Asia Holds On Against the Odds". New York Times . New York City . Retrieved 2 December 2023.
4. О родном языке корейцев Казахстана [On the mother tongue of Kazakhstani Koreans] (in Russian)
5. "Kazakhstan". Ethnologue. Retrieved 21 December 2014.
6. National composition, religion and language proficiency in the Republic of Kazakhstan (PDF). Astana: Bureau of National Statistics of the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms of the Republic of Kazakhstan. 2023. p. 323.