World Language Map

Where is Kazakh spoken?

Kazakh (Qazaq tılı) is a Turkic language, spoken in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, China and 6 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Kazakh is spoken

Kazakh is spoken in 10 countries: Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, China and 6 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Kazakhstan64%12,966,400
Mongolia7.2%236,281
AfghanistanNot givenNot given
ChinaNot givenNot given
IranNot givenNot given
KyrgyzstanNot givenNot given
RussiaNot givenNot given
TajikistanNot givenNot given
TurkmenistanNot givenNot given
UzbekistanNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Kazakh is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Kazakh.

How many people speak Kazakh?

Wikidata gives about 12.9 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Kazakh sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Kazakh as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Turkic
  2. Common Turkic
  3. Kipchak-Turkestan
  4. Kipchak
  5. Southeast Kipchak
  6. South Kipchak
  7. Kazakh

Related languages

Other languages in the South Kipchak group:

More about Kazakh

Codes: ISO 639-3 kaz, Glottolog kaza1248. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Kazakh

Where is Kazakh spoken?

Kazakh is spoken in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, China and 6 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 64% of the population of Kazakhstan, which is about 12,966,400 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Kazakh?

Wikidata gives about 12.9 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Kazakh in?

Glottolog places Kazakh in the Turkic family, in the branch Common Turkic, Kipchak-Turkestan, Kipchak, Southeast Kipchak and South Kipchak.

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