The official state language of Kazakhstan is Kazakh, however Russian is also used as a de facto official language, and is spoken almost universally. There are also a number of other languages that have substantial populations of speakers, including German, Turkish, Ukrainian and Uzbek.
Kazakh is a Turkic language in the same family as languages like Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Karakalpak.
First President of Kazakhstan – Elbasy Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a decree 26 October 2017 to modernise the existing Kazakh alphabet to Latin-based script, and amended his decree in February 2018 to better modernise some characters. President Nazarbayev announced his intention to switch from the Cyrillic-based alphabet to Latin script in April 2012. The new alphabet consists of 32 letters and letters of the old Cyrillic alphabet will be replaced by Latin analogues based on their phonetic similarity. Kazakhs used Arabic script from the 10th-20th centuries. The Kazakh language was based on Latin script in 1929-1940. The transition to the Cyrillic alphabet occurred in 1940. The Latin alphabet is currently used by most Kazakh diasporas abroad.