Cyrillic vs. QazaqKey — Kazakh you can read anywhere

The headline number

Across a 139,621-word corpus spanning classic literature, Soviet-era narrative, modern slang, legal text, and proper names, the official alphabet carries 3.2× the non-ASCII character load of QazaqKey — 50.2 diacritics per 100 words vs. 25.9, or 83.3 vs. 25.9 if the official alphabet's dotless ı is counted (it should be: dotless ı is what breaks casing, search, and default fonts). QazaqKey does this with exactly four non-ASCII letters in practice — ä ö ü ñ — against the official alphabet's eight.

Full genre-by-genre analysis, including where the official alphabet does better (legal/proper-noun text, before QazaqKey's citation-mode fix — see below) and where QazaqKey has real, acknowledged rough edges, is in the project's full evaluation report. Every example below is the complete prepared sample — click through to read it in full.

Classic literary prose (Abai)

Native, diacritic-heavy text is where the gap is starkest — every additional letter the official alphabet needs is a letter QazaqKey doesn't.

Soviet-era narrative (Auezov)

Long native narrative behaves like the Abai prose above: QazaqKey's restored glides (сиыр → syjyr) read unambiguously where the official alphabet's и/й collapse (siyr) gets mushy in long passages.

Legal / official register

This used to be QazaqKey's worst genre — unassimilated legal and administrative loanwords were run through native vowel-harmony rules that don't apply to them, producing spellings like Konstuwcyja. A dedicated citation-mode rule now catches these, matching the official alphabet's handling of the word itself while keeping QazaqKey's much lighter diacritic load everywhere else in the sentence.

Foreign proper names — countries

The full prepared list of 192 country names, not a hand-picked sample. Names converge with the official alphabet once assimilation-depth rules apply for well-settled loans.

Foreign proper names — Kazakh personal names

An essay on Kazakh onomastics, dense with native personal names (Асқар, Тоқтар, Батыр, Айсұлу...) rather than a curated shortlist — the genre this page's names section originally tried to represent with six hand-picked words.

Modern slang / hip-hop

QazaqKey mostly wins this register — ащы → ashshy reads naturally next to the official alphabet's aştşy, the ugliest form in the corpus. Casing of the all-caps chorus line is a known rough edge (see the evaluation report).

Modern slang / song

Long иı runs are the worst-scanning strings in the official alphabet's version of this corpus (süiıktısı, boiy) — parseable but mushy. QazaqKey's restored glides keep each syllable distinct.