ALMATY – Growing up in Esil, a predominantly Russian-speaking town in northern Kazakhstan, Aleksei Skalozubov didn’t feel the need to speak Kazakh, the country’s state language. The situation didn’t ...

During the service at Almaty’s Ascension Cathedral, strains of Church Slavic rise from the choir. “Lord have mercy,” they sing in the proto-Russian language still used in the Orthodox Church. As the ...

In Kazakhstan, talk about switching from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet has been ongoing since the 1990s. However, only in the late 2010s, did the Kazakh government officially initiate a ...

The ongoing switch from Cyrillic to a Latin-based alphabet in Kazakhstan has been widely presented as a step toward modernization and global integration by Kazakh officials. However, in Russian media, ...

Kazakhstan has amended its immigration and naturalization framework, imposing a history and language test as a condition for obtaining citizenship. The changes are part of a broader government effort ...