Latinizing Kazakh: Searching for a Balance between Politics and Linguistics

Abstract Following other newly independent Central Asian republics dominated by a Turkic- speaking population, Kazakhstan is currently in the process of transferring the graphic base of its national language from Cyrillic to the Latin script. This process has turned out to involve particularly many challenges, as it has been difficult to reconcile the theoretical and practical aspects of the project with the linguistic and political realities of Kazakhstan and the Kazakh language. Many of the problems are connected with the desire to design the new Latin orthography on the basis of the established Cyrillic norm without considering the occasionally misleading phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences incorporated in this norm. Other problems are connected with the political difficulty of choosing the actual set of Latin graphemes, for which several possible models are available, including those already officially established for the national languages of other Central Asian republics, as well as for Turkish in Turkey.