Kazakhstan is officially a bilingual country. Kazakh, part of the Kipchak sub-branch of the Turkic languages, is proficiently spoken by 80.1% of the population according to the 2021 census, and has the status of "state language". Russian, on the other hand, is spoken by 83.7% as of 2021. The Constitution of Kazakhstan does not give it any special status, only allowing its use in government "on an equal footing" with Kazakh. Russian is also used routinely in business and inter-ethnic communication. However, only 63.45% of ethnic Kazakhs and 49.3% of the country's population are daily speakers of Kazakh language, according to the same census.
Other languages natively spoken in Kazakhstan are Dungan, Ili Turki, Ingush, Plautdietsch, and Sinte Romani. A number of more recent immigrant languages, such as Belarusian, Korean, Azerbaijani, and Greek are also spoken.О родном языке корейцев Казахстана [On the mother tongue of Kazakhstani Koreans] (in Russian)
Languages The following table shows the share of the population that can speak the language according to the : Language Script Russian 83.7 Cyrillic Kazakh 80.1 Cyrillic, Latin English 35.1 Latin Uzbek 2.5 Latin, Cyrillic Uyghur 0.9 Perso-Arabic, Latin Turkish 0.6 Latin German 0.6 Latin Tatar 0.5 Cyrillic Azerbaijani 0.5 Cyrillic, Latin, Perso-Arabic Korean 0.3 Hangul Kyrgyz 0.2 Cyrillic, Perso-Arabic Belarusian 0.1 Cyrillic Ukrainian 0.1 Cyrillic Chinese 0.1 Chinese characters Chechen 0.1 Cyrillic French 0.1 Latin Arabic 0.1 Arabic alphabet Other 2.7 —
Gallery
See also Demographics of Kazakhstan
References