While I came here to study the Russian language, Almaty is more than just a Russian-speaking city. Almost everyone with whom I’ve interacted here speaks Russian, but at the same time it’s impossible to avoid encountering other languages, most of all Kazakh. This is apparent from the moment you step out of the airport, before even interacting with any locals. Kazakh is almost always the first language to appear on public buildings, street signs, and advertisements, usually followed by Russian, with English sometimes taking third place.
There’s some variation on this order, however. On the buses in Almaty, the recorded voice that announces the upcoming stop speaks first in Kazakh, then in Russian. The name of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University appears in English and Kazakh on the front of the gate, while the university’s motto appears in Kazakh and Russian on the back. The university library’s museum showcasing the life of its namesake has descriptions for the dioramas available in all three languages, whereas the third-floor room centered around a statue of a number of Kazakh political leaders is entirely in Kazakh. A mass produced patriotic diorama, which I’ve been told displays the text of the national anthem and explains the meanings of the flag and coat of arms, is entirely in Kazakh as well. Corporate billboards advertising cars, soft drinks, banks, etc. usually have Kazakh text above Russian, but give both languages equal visual weight.
Small businesses can get quite creative with the languages they use on signs. It’s very common for Russian and Kazakh to be displayed side by side, but English is usually visually distinguished from the other two languages in these contexts, or displayed alone. Coffee shops in particular are fond of using English on signs, even if none of the staff know more than a few words. Most likely English writing is seen as a way to appear cool and hip, even in cases where its literal meaning seems completely out of place, such as one coffee shop which advertised itself as “your daily dose of vitamins.”
Kazakh writing doesn’t all look the same, however. Supposedly, before the Russian Revolution, the Arabic alphabet was used in the rare cases when Kazakh was written at all. But you wouldn’t know it from walking around Almaty, as the closest thing to Arabic script that I saw was a Cyrillic font stylized to look like Arabic. Most Kazakh writing in public is still in Cyrillic, the legacy of a long history of Russian and Soviet rule, although a transition to the Latin alphabet is underway, spearheaded by a government that wants to shed the legacy of Russian colonization and more fully integrate Kazakhstan into the global economy.
This has been a messy process, with the government cycling through several variations of the Latin alphabet in an attempt to shoehorn the 31-32 sounds of Kazakh speech into an alphabet with only 26 letters. The Kazakh version of the Cyrillic alphabet included entirely new letters such as Ө, Ә, Қ, Ғ, Ң, Ұ, and Һ whereas in the Latin alphabet linguists decided to represent the extra sounds by adding accent marks to existing letters. (Or in one thankfully short-lived early proposal, apostrophes.)
In 2021, the government, supposedly for good, settled on a new version of the Latin alphabet, based on the one used to write in Turkish since the 1920s. I struggle to recall a single place where I saw this script, with the earlier accented version being much more popular, although still less widespread than Cyrillic. It’s really made me think about what a massive task it is to change the writing system of an entire nation. Though the plan has been public for years, not a single street sign that I saw had been changed to the Latin alphabet. A sizable minority of government buildings still had signs in Cyrillic, though many private businesses seemed to have enthusiastically put up shiny new signs in the Latin alphabet. The deadline for completing the transition has been mercifully extended to 2031.
My host parents, who grew up in the Soviet Union, rarely speak Kazakh despite learning it at a young age. When I was walking around the neighborhood with their eldest (mid 20s) son, however, I noticed that he always spoke Kazakh to other Kazakhs. His parents later told me that he sometimes scolds them for not speaking Kazakh enough. His linguistic patriotism didn’t extend to his opinion on the alphabet issue, however, as both he and his parents prefer to read and write in the Cyrillic alphabet they learned at school.
Based on my short experience, Russian is enough to get around here, although I have picked up a few Kazakh words such as “hello,” “thank you,” “water,” “exit” and a bunch of terms for Kazakh cuisine. There are many ethnic Russians living here and I even hear ethnic Kazakhs speaking Russian among themselves on the street sometimes. I have never noticed the reverse occurring, although on TV I saw a Russian girl who my host mother informed me grew up in an almost 100% Kazakh village speaking fluent Kazakh at some sort of town hall style meeting.
It’s tempting to say that Kazakh is the language of the future and Russian is the language of the past. But the sheer inertia of Kazakhstan’s history as an appendage of Russia should not be underestimated, nor should the distance Kazakh still has to cover match the predominance of Russian in many areas of life. Harry Potter was published in Kazakh before any of Kafka’s works, for example. And if any language is replacing Russian’s role as a vehicle for communication with the outside world, it isn’t Kazakh, but English. Though it’s certainly a good time to lean Kazakh, you need not worry that your Russian skills will become obsolete here tomorrow.
