Kazakhstan is rewriting its national identity by transitioning from Cyrillic to Latin script

Nature · Published 30 September 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: For decades, the Kazakh language has been tethered to the Cyrillic alphabet, a legacy of the Soviet era. Now, the nation is undergoing a complex, phased transition to a Latin-based script. This shift is more than a technical update; it is a deliberate effort to reclaim national identity and reduce Russian influence.

The history of Kazakh writing is a layered map of shifting political alliances. While the Arabic script was traditionally used for centuries, it was replaced in 1929 by the Latin-based Yañalif. By 1940, the Soviet Union had forced a switch to a Cyrillic alphabet, which remains the standard in Kazakhstan today. This Cyrillic system, reworked by Sarsen Amanzholov, contains 42 letters—33 from the Russian alphabet plus nine unique characters to capture distinct Kazakh phonemes.

In 2017, President Nursultan Nazarbayev officially initiated the move back to a Latin script, aiming to complete the transition by 2025. However, the process has been iterative and occasionally contentious. Early proposals favored apostrophes to avoid diacritics, but later revisions—influenced by the Common Turkic Alphabet—shifted toward using umlauts, breves, and cedillas. By 2021, the target date for full implementation was pushed back to 2031, reflecting the difficulty of balancing linguistic accuracy with national stability.

The transition is deeply symbolic. Nazarbayev argued that the Soviet period devastated Kazakh culture, and adopting a Latin script serves to weaken the lingering influence of the Russian language, which currently holds official status. Beyond the politics, the shift poses practical challenges for orthography. Linguists must ensure the new script accurately reflects Kazakh phonology, including complex vowel harmonies and sounds that do not exist in Russian. As the country moves forward, this linguistic evolution remains a central pillar of Kazakhstan's post-Soviet nation-building project.

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