At the end of last month Kazakhstan's ageing authoritarian President Nursultan Nazarbayev created a stir when he ordered officials to speak in the state language, Kazakh, rather than the country's ...

ALMATY – Growing up in Esil, a predominantly Russian-speaking town in northern Kazakhstan, Aleksei Skalozubov didn’t feel the need to speak Kazakh, the country’s state language. The situation didn’t ...

During the service at Almaty’s Ascension Cathedral, strains of Church Slavic rise from the choir. “Lord have mercy,” they sing in the proto-Russian language still used in the Orthodox Church. As the ...

It has been 10 years since Kazakhstan adopted a law that enshrined Kazakh as the state language, and required all citizens to learn it. A decade later, major challenges continue to hamper efforts to ...

In Kazakhstan, talk about switching from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet has been ongoing since the 1990s. However, only in the late 2010s, did the Kazakh government officially initiate a ...

The parents of some 1,200 students in the central Kazakh town of Temirtau have until September to find another school -- that is, if they want to continue their studies in their first language, ...

The ongoing switch from Cyrillic to a Latin-based alphabet in Kazakhstan has been widely presented as a step toward modernization and global integration by Kazakh officials. However, in Russian media, ...

In the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan, Caitlin Walczyk practiced her Russian in cab rides across the city of Almaty. The double major in global studies and political science spent nine months in ...

Kazakhstan embraced independence 30 years ago, yet is still actively nation-building around language, shared history, and cultural diversity with the over 100 ethnic groups living in the vast Central ...