Kazakh Language | Alphabet, History, & Facts - Britannica

Linguistic structure

Like other Turkic languages, Kazakh is an agglutinative language—that is, one characterized by agglutination, a grammatical process in which words are composed of a sequence of morphemes (meaningful word elements), each of which represents not more than a single grammatical category. In Kazakh, suffixes are added onto stems to create new meanings. The most common type of suffix in Kazakh is an inflectional suffix. These suffixes carry grammatical meanings, such as marking plurality, possession, or case on nouns and indicating tense and negation on verbs. Less common are derivational suffixes, which create words with new meanings from other words. For example, the Kazakh word jūmysshy (Cyrillic: жұмысшы; ‘worker’) is created by adding the -shy (Cyrillic: -шы) suffix to the word jūmys (Cyrillic: жұмыс; ‘work’), in the same way that adding the English derivational suffix -er creates the word worker from work.

The Kazakh language has both vowel harmony and consonant assimilation. Vowel harmony in Kazakh, as in Turkish, is based on a distinction between front vowels (ӓ, ö, ü, ı, e, і [Cyrillic: ә, ө, ү, і, е, и]) and back vowels (a, o, ū, u, y [Cyrillic: а, о, ұ, у, ы]). The vowels of suffixes vary according to whether the final vowel of the stem is a front or back vowel. Consonant assimilation means that suffixes also have variants with different beginning consonants. The form used in a given situation is based on the final consonant (or lack thereof) of the stem.

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In terms of syntax, Kazakh follows a subject–object–verb (SOV) word order in most cases, although subject–verb–object and object–verb–subject orders may be used to emphasize certain information. Subordinate clauses generally precede the main clause and utilize verbal nouns, verbal adjectives (participles), and verbal adverbs (converbs), rather than conjunctions or relative pronouns as in English. Similarly, relative clauses are formed with verbal participles and precede the noun or phrase they modify. Questions that can be answered with yes or no are constructed by adding a question particle to the sentence, whereas other interrogative sentences are made by using question words (e.g., ne [не] ‘what,’ qaida [қайда] ‘where,’ and qalay [қалай] ‘how’).

Also spelled: Kazak (Show more) Related Topics: Kazakh literature Northwestern Turkic languages (Show more) See all related content