- published: 01 Aug 2011
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Kazakh (also Qazaq and variants, natively Қазақ тілі, Qazaq tili, قازاق ٴتىلى; pronounced [qɑˈzɑq tɘˈlɘ]) is a Turkic language which belongs to the Kipchak (or Western Turkic) branch of the Turkic languages, closely related to Nogai and Karakalpak.
Kazakh is an agglutinative language, and it employs vowel harmony.
The Kazakh language has its speakers (mainly Kazakhs) spread over a vast territory from the Tian Shan mountains to the western shore of Caspian Sea. Kazakh is the official state language of Kazakhstan, in which nearly 10 million speakers are reported to live (based on the CIA World Factbook's estimates for population and percentage of Kazakh speakers)[citation needed] . More than a million speakers reside in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The 2002 Russian Census reported 560,000 Kazakh speakers in Russia. Other sizable populations of Kazakh speakers live in Mongolia (fewer than 200,000). Large numbers exist elsewhere in Central Asia (mostly in Uzbekistan) and other parts of former Soviet Union, and in Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and other countries. There are also some Kazakh speakers in Germany who immigrated from Turkey in the 1970s.
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty-five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.
Turkic languages are spoken as a native language by some 165 to 200 million people; and the total number of Turkic speakers is over 300 million, including speakers of a second language. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish proper, or Anatolian [and Balkan] Turkish, the speakers of which account for about 40% of all Turkic speakers.
Characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family. There is also a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the various Oghuz languages, which include Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, Balkan Gagauz Turkish and Oghuz influenced Crimean Tatar.
The characteristic features of the Turkic languages are vowel harmony, extensive agglutination by means of suffixes and other affixes, and lack of noun classes or grammatical gender. Subject–object–verb word order is universal within the family. All of these distinguishing characteristics are shared with the Mongolic, Tungusic, and Korean language families, as well as (with the exception of vowel harmony) with Japonic, which are considered by some linguists to be genetically linked with the Turkic languages in an Altaic language family.