Languages of Kazakhstan


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.

Languages

The following table shows the share of the population that can speak the language according to the :
LanguageScript
Russian83.7Cyrillic
Kazakh80.1Cyrillic, Latin
English35.1Latin
Uzbek2.5Latin, Cyrillic
Uyghur0.9Perso-Arabic, Latin
Turkish0.6Latin
German0.6Latin
Tatar0.5Cyrillic
Azerbaijani0.5Cyrillic, Latin, Perso-Arabic
Korean0.3Hangul
Kyrgyz0.2Cyrillic, Perso-Arabic
Belarusian0.1Cyrillic
Ukrainian0.1Cyrillic
Chinese0.1Chinese characters
Chechen0.1Cyrillic
French0.1Latin
Arabic0.1Arabic alphabet
Other2.7