Between Two Scripts: The Stalled Transition to Latin in Kazakhstan

In December 2012, former President Nursultan Nazarbayev introduced the Kazakhstan 2050 strategy, which designated 2025 as the beginning of the Kazakh language’s transition from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin script. In 2017, he turned that start date into a deadline, decreeing that the transition be complete by 2025. That deadline has since been pushed back to 2031, but even that date is far from certain. Four obstacles stand in the way: budgetary concerns, socio-cultural issues, geopolitical challenges, and executive turnover. Neighboring Uzbekistan, which faced many of the same obstacles, adopted a Latin alphabet in 1993 and planned to finish the switch by 2000. More than three decades later, it still operates a dual-script system, in which Latin and Cyrillic are used side by side: schools teach in Latin, while Cyrillic remains common in government and publishing. Facing the same mix of limited practical payoff and political costs, Kazakhstan is more likely to settle into a lasting dual-script system of its own than to complete a clean switch by 2031.

Kazakhstan’s desire for a new alphabet is rooted in how Kazakhs became a minority in their own country. Although Russian settlers began arriving on the northern steppe in the 1880s, the most dramatic demographic shifts came under Soviet rule. Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization of Kazakh nomads set off a famine from 1930 to 1933 that killed about 1.5 million people, roughly 1.3 million of them Kazakhs. Kazakhs, who had made up around 60 percent of the republic’s population, were left a minority. Furthermore, over the following decades, hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and Volga Germans were deported from their homelands and sent to Kazakhstan. In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign put many of them to work alongside Slavic settlers farming the northern steppe. By the last Soviet census in 1989, Kazakhs made up just 39.7 percent of the population, barely ahead of Russians at 37.8 percent.

Independence reversed that trend, as the end of Soviet rule set off a demographic shift that steadily rebuilt the Kazakh majority over the next three decades. The return of ethnic Kazakhs from abroad, higher Kazakh birth rates, and Russian emigration pushed the Kazakh share of the population to 70.4 percent by 2021. With that majority secure, the government revived the Latin alphabet as a way to invigorate Kazakh culture and distance the country from Moscow. Agreeing on what that alphabet should look like, however, proved harder than setting a deadline for it. After several rejected versions and more than 40 drafts, a national commission presented a new alphabet in 2021, but its spelling rules are still being refined five years later. These delays have less to do with the letters themselves than with the obstacles surrounding the reform.

The most immediate obstacle is financing the reform, since rewriting a language’s script impacts every classroom, government office, and street sign in the country. Retraining teachers, printing textbooks, replacing signs, and converting documents was estimated in 2018 to cost around $664 million, with roughly half of that budget going towards retraining teachers. While that sum is well within reach for an economy of Kazakhstan’s size, the real question is what it would actually buy. Many Kazakhs argue that the money would be better spent developing rural areas or improving the education system. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to teach people to write Kazakh differently does nothing to encourage its usage, which makes the price tag difficult for the government to justify.

The transition’s social costs would also fall unevenly, and not on the group most often described as its victims. The reform has raised concerns among Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking population, yet those concerns are largely misplaced. Russian will retain its Cyrillic script and will maintain its official status as the language of “interethnic communication,” leaving no direct impact on Russian speakers. Instead, the burden falls on Kazakh speakers, who would have to relearn how to read and write their own language, a task especially difficult for older generations educated entirely in Cyrillic. Meanwhile, the reform offers nothing to the people it most needs to reach: Kazakhstanis who know the language but rarely use it. In the 2021 census, 80 percent of Kazakhstanis said they knew Kazakh, but only 49 percent used it daily. A new alphabet gives that group no new reason to speak Kazakh, and a long dual-script transition could make the language more cumbersome to use while Russian stays exactly the same. Some educators already fear this outcome. One Kazakh teacher at a Russian language school warned that a new alphabet would give Russian-speaking Kazakh children another reason not to learn Kazakh.

Even if the reform’s costs and social effects could be managed, Kazakhstan would still have to weigh how any move away from Cyrillic might be read by Russia. Moscow’s official reaction to the reform was restrained, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying Latinization did not violate Russian speakers’ rights. However, Russian media was far less diplomatic, mocking the reform and warning that abandoning Cyrillic would marginalize Kazakhstan’s Russian minority. That pressure has only grown more serious since the invasion of Ukraine, which has forced Kazakhstan’s government to balance asserting its independence against provoking its neighbor.

The reform has also lost its most important champion. Nazarbayev made the implementation of the alphabet his personal project, but his successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who became president in 2019, treated the subject with far more caution. In 2022, he said Latinization should not be rushed, and in 2023, he added that it should not be a mere mechanical switch from Cyrillic to Latin. Neither statement cancels the reform, but both give the government reason to keep delaying it, with one recent study going as far as to say Tokayev effectively suspended the transition. The original 2025 deadline has already come and gone, and without a president willing to push for it, the 2031 deadline is unlikely to fare any better.

The obstacles facing Kazakhstan are not unique to it: Uzbekistan, another post-Soviet Turkic state whose population was raised on Cyrillic, began its own switch to Latin in 1993. The two reforms have followed strikingly similar paths. Uzbekistan failed to accomplish the switch by 2000, giving way to a series of new deadlines, most recently January 2023, which also passed, just as Kazakhstan’s 2025 deadline has shifted to 2031. In both countries, the reform’s progression has hinged on the president, with President Shavkat Mirziyoyev reviving Uzbekistan’s stalled switch in 2020, and President Tokayev slowing Kazakhstan’s. Nevertheless, even Mirziyoyev’s push could not finish the job. A dual-script system would allow Kazakhstan’s government to symbolically claim progress without paying the full cost of a nationwide switch, spare older Kazakhs from relearning their language, and avoid a clean break from Cyrillic that Moscow could frame as a turn toward the West. If Uzbekistan could not finish under a president committed to the switch, Kazakhstan, under one who is not, is even less likely to.

Not every post-Soviet or Turkic country stalled the way Uzbekistan has, but the ones that succeeded did so under conditions that Kazakhstan lacks: low literacy rates, authoritarian control, or a leader willing to force the change. Turkey changed scripts in 1928, when only about 8 percent of its population was literate. Therefore, most Turks were not switching alphabets; they were learning to read for the first time, making the transition easier. Turkmenistan, on the other hand, switched in 1993 under a highly authoritarian government that imposed the change with almost no public consultation, so public objections never had a chance to slow the reform down. Azerbaijan’s parliament voted to adopt the Latin alphabet shortly after declaring independence in 1991, seeing it as a way to align with other Turkic nations and distance the country from Russian rule. Even so, the switch took a decade to complete, and it was finished only when President Heydar Aliyev issued a decree in 2001, giving the country about six weeks to convert from Cyrillic to Latin.

Kazakhstan has none of these advantages. Unlike Turkey, nearly its entire population already reads Cyrillic, so a switch means undoing a lifetime of reading habits rather than teaching people to read for the first time. Unlike Turkmenistan, its government, though far from democratic, has repeatedly bent to public opinion on this issue, scrapping earlier versions of the alphabet after public criticism. And unlike Azerbaijan, it has no leader willing to force the issue, since Tokayev has shown no interest in setting a hard deadline. Azerbaijan’s case also shows what happens in the absence of that push. In the decade between its 1991 decision and Aliyev’s decree, the country operated using two scripts. Dual-script systems, then, are the result of stagnation, not failure, emerging when a reform loses momentum and no leader is willing to push it forward. As Azerbaijan shows, that stage is not necessarily permanent: a future Kazakh president could revive the reform and force it to completion. However, without any of the conditions that carried Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan through, Kazakhstan is likely to remain in that state for the foreseeable future, just as Uzbekistan has.

Originally, Kazakhstan’s push for a Latin alphabet grew out of a real desire to reclaim a national identity shaped by Soviet rule, but wanting a new alphabet does not intrinsically provide the political will necessary to fulfill this goal. With costs that are hard to justify, a burden on Kazakh speakers, pressure from Moscow, and a president content to let deadlines drift, Kazakhstan will likely keep teaching Latin while Cyrillic endures everywhere else.