Why QazaqKey?

Before Cyrillic: Kazakh's own choice

Kazakh was a written language long before Cyrillic. It used Akhmet Baitursynov's reformed Arabic script (the töte jazu, from 1912), then a Latin script built on the Unified Turkic Alphabet (Jaŋalif, from 1929). In both traditions Kazakh's own linguists made the same call: loanwords were absorbed fully into native phonology rather than copied over in their foreign spelling. The First Congress of Kazakh Scholars put the principle on record in 1924: foreign words are to be written by the rules of the Kazakh language.

Telzhan Shonanuly, the main speaker on orthography at the 1929 Qyzylorda conference, published a 31-point proposal on foreign words around the conference, and it is overwhelmingly assimilationist. Some of his examples: ф became p; word-initial г became ç, the Jaŋalif letter for Kazakh ж; ц became s (apeser for офицер, stansa for станция); the Russian ending -ция became -sa/-se (milijse for милиция); and -ия became -a/-ä (burçuvaza for буржуазия). Kazakh scholars made this choice deliberately, in the Latin era, before Cyrillic entered the picture at all.

The stated intent

Today's Cyrillic Kazakh alphabet was not a neutral step in the language's evolution. Soviet archival footage of the decision announces its purpose in so many words:

«Новый алфавит призван сблизить культуру русского и казахского народов»
“The new alphabet is meant to bring the cultures of the Russian and Kazakh peoples closer together,” says the film’s own narration. In practice the closing of that distance went one way: Kazakh moved toward Russian.

Source: Azattyq (RFE/RL Kazakh service), "Как казахский язык переходил на кириллицу", which credits the footage to Kazakhstan's Central State Archive of Film and Photo Documents. Azattyq, the Kazakh service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has been broadcasting since 1953.

Overridden by decree, not persuasion

Then came 1938. Loan letters “for use in Russian words” (F, X) were added to the still-Latin alphabet, and the 1938 orthography reform swapped the nativized spellings for Russian citation forms of the sovet and kolxoz type. That same year, Russian became a compulsory subject in Kazakh schools. The switch to Cyrillic in 1940 was formally a separate law, but by then the alphabet had already been facing Russian citation norms for two years.

Kazakh's sibling languages went through the same thing on the same schedule. Under the Kyrgyz linguist Kasym Tynystanov's 1934 draft orthography, Soviet vocabulary was in practice written to fit Kyrgyz phonology (qalqoz, doqtur); in 1938 those spellings were condemned as “distortions” and replaced with the Russian forms kolxoz and doktor. Same year, same justification, different language. Nogai had moved even earlier: conferences in 1931–33 added several letters to its Latin script, some specifically for sounds in Russian loanwords, and in 1935 a meeting of Nogai workers under the Cherkess regional party committee cut several letters again, a mix of original and loan-era ones, in the name of simplification.

A live example of how the harm gets measured

This project ran into the same bias itself, and the honest thing is to describe that rather than edit it out. An early analysis of one spelling rule, how to render the Russian “soft sign” (ь), leaned on frequency data from mainstream Kazakhstani text and concluded that a certain vowel-fronting pattern was rare, so the “correct” spelling should ignore it: медаль as medal rather than medäl. The conclusion was wrong, and wrong in an instructive way. The corpus was measuring Russified pronunciation and mistaking it for the baseline. The fronting is real and common among Kazakh speakers who never went through decades of Russian-medium schooling and media: in Mongolia, China, Iran, and Türkiye.

That is the general problem with treating “whatever is common in today's Kazakhstani corpus” as ground truth. Any method built on it will faithfully reproduce the very Russification it should be correcting for. QazaqKey takes diaspora and pre-reform usage as the reference point instead, and reads mainstream-corpus frequency as a record of the damage, not a target to match.

It has not stopped

Citation-mode Russification is not one event in the past. It is a pattern that keeps reasserting itself, independence notwithstanding, and Kyrgyz orthographic history shows the cycle in detail. Nativized pre-revolutionary loans were grandfathered into the 1940 Cyrillic rules, abolished outright in 1953, partially re-admitted in 2002 under a declared principle of “phoneticism”, and in 2008 the reform was officially reframed as a return to the 1953 orthography. In practice the 2008 reversal fell mostly on place-name spellings and the declared sound inventory, while most of 2002's nativized loanword spellings survived. The pattern recurs across the wider Kipchak family for a simple reason: citation spelling is usually the cheaper option for a writer under pressure, so left unchecked it expands over time rather than receding, whoever nominally runs the orthography.

Talk of a Kazakh Latin alphabet goes back to 1991, when scholars from the newly independent Turkic republics met at a symposium in Istanbul to propose a shared script. Kazakhstan never adopted it. A government commission produced its own report in 2006–2007, a phased 12–15-year transition plan priced at roughly $300 million; it was shelved, probably owing in part to the 2007–08 financial crisis and shifting political priorities. Kazinform, the state news agency, went as far as building its own Latin romanization system for a switch that never officially came. The formal reform has been running since 2017 and has produced four public versions: two fixed by presidential decree (the apostrophes of 2017, the acute accents of 2018) and two further drafts (2019, then the 2021 version with diacritics). Each answered the criticism of the previous one without resolving the underlying tension. An alphabet designed by committee, in a country where Russian is still the dominant language of administration and media, keeps arriving at compromises that sit closer to Russian citation habits than to Kazakh phonology. As of this writing the 2021 version has still not been formally adopted, and the transition deadline has slipped from 2025 to 2031.

A newer development: the Common Turkic Alphabet

In 2022 the Organization of Turkic States, through the Turkic Academy, began work on a Common Turkic Alphabet (CTA) shared across the Turkic-speaking states. A 34-letter CTA was adopted in Baku in 2024; in June 2026 the CTA commission approved CTA-based recommended alphabets for both Kazakh and Kyrgyz. Formal adoption still rests with each national government, and no Kazakhstan decree has adopted it yet — but it is the alphabet QazaqKey's “Common Turkic Alphabet (CTA)” option converts to today, replacing the outgoing 2021 spec's digraphs (ч → tş) with dedicated single letters (ч → ç) and repartitioning a few merged sounds.

QazaqKey and the CTA-based Kazakh alphabet are offered here as two independent options, not a mandate and its alternative: CTA is the Turkic Academy's shared standard, QazaqKey is this project's own design. Pick whichever fits what you're writing.

Also known as: Kazakh: Ортақ түркі әліпбиі / Ortaq türki älipbiji · Russian: Общий тюркский алфавит · Turkish: Ortak Türk Alfabesi · Azerbaijani: Ortaq türk əlifbası · Kyrgyz: Жалпы түрк алиппеси · Uzbek: Umumturkiy alifbo · Turkmen: Umumy türki elipbiýi · English: Common Turkic Alphabet

What QazaqKey does differently

Two design decisions follow from this history. First, QazaqKey keeps loanword handling deliberately narrow. Recent, unassimilated loans and foreign proper nouns go through a separate, tightly triggered “citation mode” that never touches native vowel harmony, while the native pipeline remains the unmarked default: the exact opposite of the historical drift, in which citation spelling grew at the native system's expense. Second, every rule that reconstructs pronunciation (vowel-glide restoration, soft-sign fronting, and the rest) is checked against authentic, un-Russified speech first. The modern Kazakhstani corpus comes second, as a check on frequency and coverage, never as the arbiter of what counts as correct.

References

1. Azattyq (RFE/RL Kazakh service), archival footage on the 1940 Cyrillic decision — azattyqasia.org/a/alfavit1940-video (also on YouTube)
2. Kazakh (kk) Wikipedia, First Congress of Kazakh Scholars (Orenburg, 1924) — kk.wikipedia.org — Qazaq bılımpazdarynyñ tuñğyş sezı
3. Odagiri, K. (2015). "How to Deal with the Elements of Russian Origin: Developments of Orthographic Reforms for the Kyrgyz Language." Kansai University (PDF) — kansai-u.ac.jp/fl/publication/pdf_department/12/69odagiri.pdf
4. Tiltanym journal, №3(95) 2024, on Telzhan Shonanuly's orthographic principles (PDF) — tiltanym.kz/jour/article/download/1622/721
5. "Kazakh and Turkic Alphabet Reform 1900–1939: Change Without Change," University of Illinois pressbook — iopn.library.illinois.edu — chapter 10
6. Kazakh alphabets — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets
7. Nogai alphabets — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nogai_alphabets
8. Nogai language — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nogai_language
9. Romanization of Kyrgyz — Wikipedia — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Kyrgyz
10. Blitstein, P. (2001). "Nation-Building or Russification? Obligatory Russian Instruction in the Soviet Non-Russian School, 1938–1953." In R. G. Suny & T. Martin (eds.), A State of Nations (Oxford University Press) — on the March 1938 compulsory-Russian decree — academic.oup.com — Blitstein, "Nation-Building or Russification?"
11. Kazakh (Latin) script, 1938 revision, on the added loan letters F/X — type.today — a history of Kazakh script
12. RFE/RL, "Common Turkic Alphabet" coverage (2024) — rferl.org — common Turkic alphabet
13. Eurasianet, "Kazakhstan: The ABCs of the Alphabet Debate" — eurasianet.org — the alphabet debate
14. Kazinform — Wikipedia (its independent pre-2017 Latin romanization system) — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazinform
15. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Wikipedia (Azattyq's parent organization) — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Liberty

The full internal research notes behind this page, including the process record for how QazaqKey's own rules were checked against this history, are kept in the project repository's docs/ folder.