The Kazakh Language

 

So this has been a relatively slow and quiet week and I don’t have many crazy stories to tell but I had an opportunity to get on the internet and wanted to post a blog so I have decided to write about a topic that I’ve wanted to explain for a while: the Kazakh language.

I have been learning the language for about 3 months now and it really is surprising how quickly one can pick up the basics of the language when you spend 4-5 hours learning it every day. Also, immersion, even partial, will speed up the learning process exponentially. For example, in my host family my mother speaks no English but my father speaks a fair amount. Igris, my host father, isn’t around much but I do depend on his language skills for communicating some of the more difficult topics with Deena. But lately I have noticed that I can communicate more and more with Deena and we understand each other. When I got here in August it would have been impossible for me even begin to communicate on this level.

One of the things that I find the most fascinating about the language is its resilience. During the Soviet times the USSR made Russian the official language of Kazakhstan and demanded that all of its citizens speak only Russian. So you have at least one, if not two or three, generations that grew up speaking mostly Russian–Kazakh was confined to the smaller villages and the southern regions of Kazakhstan. You would think that in that amount of time the language would have been wiped out (especially since it was mostly a spoken language and not really a written language, something that is still causing some trouble for Kazakh today, but I will explain more later) but it survived somehow. Today the government is putting a bigger emphasis on the Kazakh language and now in order to get a government job you must speak both Russian and Kazakh. This is creating its own problems in Kazakhstan because there is a difference between the ethnically Russian Kazakhstanians and the ethnically Kazakh Kazakhstanians (yes, the official term is a Kazakhstanian person). It has also been difficult for Kazakhstan to implement some of these new guidelines because Kazakh was a mostly spoken language and when the language was beginning to become formalized they had to pick an alphabet and create the spelling for a lot of these words. Kazakhstan decided to use the same alphabet that Russian uses but a lot of the other languages in central asia adopted the Turkish alphabet so even though two countries speak practically the same language they use widely different alphabets. It has also been a problem translating the language into other languages (as in, translating Kazakh into English and vice versa) because there are many discrepancies on the meanings of words and which words are more appropriate then others.

One thing I have yet to encounter are dialects. I’m sure the country has them (a country this large must have dialects, its unavoidable) but since I have been mostly in the Almaty region I have only heard this type of Kazakh. The closest I have come to “dialects” is when my Kazakh teacher (who is from the south of Kazakhstan) has taught us a word that my parents here do not know. So I know that there are differences in the language and I am looking forward to hearing the Aktobe dialect and discovering what makes it different from other parts of the country.

I won’t lie, one of my favorite things about the Kazakh language are its grammar structures. Grammar was the bane of my existence when learning German but for whatever reason I just understand Kazakh grammar. Here are some of the highlights of the language:

1. There are no genders in the Kazakh language (YES!) meaning it is the same as English when we simply say “it” for objects. Kazakh takes it a step further, they don’t even have a word for he/she him/her. Everything is simply “Ol” which means…it.

2. There are no prepostitions in Kazakh. That means they do not have separate words for “in, on, for, with, from, of, at, to” instead the language has what is called a post-position. They have endings that you end to every word in order to communicate that information. At first it is extremely, extremely confusing but once you get your mind wrapped around it–its actually not that difficult. I have “to, for, with” down pat and I’m working on “in, at, on”–slow and steady is the way to do it. The only confusing part comes when you have to add many endings to the word. Because every time you add an ending you make a new word and that will change what ending you place on the word next.

3. The language has 42 letters in its alphabet, 9 of which are unique to the Kazakh language and the rest are borrowed from the Cyrillic (Russian) language.

4. The verb ALWAYS goes at the end of the sentence. I thought that German was bad about that but Kazakh takes it to a whole new level. Also, there is a positive and a negative form of each word. For example in English we simply use the word “not” when we want to negate a verb. I do not swim. I will not go. Etc. In Kazakh you add a sound in the verb to negate it. For example: “unaida” means “to like” (for this example I’ve spelled the word phonetically, that is in no way how its actually spelled) to say that you don’t like you use the verb “unamaida”. I think it will take a while before I begin to master that little grammar nugget.

So that is just a taste of the Kazakh language. I hope that I’ve explained enough things to give you a better idea of language and how fascinating it is. I try to keep my blog on the shorter side–I could write A LOT more about the language–but I don’t want to bore people! If you have any more questions about the language please let me know, I am more then happy to answer questions. I have always found language and the study of language to be fascinating and so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the relationship between language and culture and would love to share my findings with you. I also need to be challenged! Its going to be a long winter and I will need something to keep my mind active and inquisitive. So any ideas you have would be great!!!