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Kazakh alphabet

The Kazakh alphabet is the Kazakh Cyrillic: 42 letters. 42 letters: the 33 of the Russian alphabet and 9 of its own; six of the 33 serve loanwords. The characters are grouped: the nine letters of its own, letters for two sounds, only in loanwords. Every character on this page can be played: the sound is stored as a file and does not depend on the voices installed on your system.

Updated September 1, 2026 · Lingofly

All 42 letters in one list

а, ә, б, в, г, ғ, д, е, ё, ж, з, и, й, к, қ, л, м, н, ң, о, ө, п, р, с, т, у, ұ, ү, ф, х, һ, ц, ч, ш, щ, ъ, ы, і, ь, э, ю, я

The nine letters of its own

They carry the sounds the Russian alphabet has no letters for. Five are vowels (ә ө ұ ү і), and vowel harmony rests on them: a word is spoken all-back or all-front, and the ending adjusts to it.

Letters for two sounds

Each of them hides a second sound. е gets a y before it at the start of a word, and ю and я are y plus a vowel. и is a short vowel plus y, and у is w, or a short vowel plus w.

Only in loanwords

Six signs that came in with Russian words: ё ц щ ъ ь э. Native Kazakh words do without them, apart from a handful with щ, and the new Latin alphabet has no letters for them. в, ф and ч also live almost only in loanwords, but they stand with the common letters.

Twenty-two common letters

Five of them read the way they look: а к м о т. Five only look Latin: В is v, Н is n, Р is r, С is s, Х is kh. The other twelve are new shapes: eleven consonants and one vowel, ы.

What to know about this script

There are 42 letters: the 33 of the Russian alphabet and 9 that Kazakh added for its own sounds. The order is the alphabetical one: the added letters stand next to their plain relatives (ә after а, қ after к, ө after о). Kazakhstan has been switching to a Latin alphabet since 2017, and the version has been redrawn several times. Yet everyday life, school and the internet still write in Cyrillic — so the course does too.

Where this script came from and why it looks the way it does

Test yourself

Five characters at random. No need to answer aloud — just pick; the answer appears at once.

  1. Which character reads as “a as in "father"”?

  2. Which character reads as “v as in "van"”?

  3. Which character reads as “d as in "dog"”?

  4. Which character reads as “zh as in "measure"”?

  5. Which character reads as “y as in "boy" (a glide)”?

How to learn letters so they stay

You cannot learn a table by staring at it. What works: see a character, try to recall its sound, get it wrong, see the right answer — and come back to that character in a day, not in an hour.

That is why the alphabet in the app is learned a few characters at a time, not all at once: nobody holds 42 signs in one sitting.

Frequently asked

How many letters in the Kazakh alphabet?

42 letters — Kazakh Cyrillic: а, ә, б, в, г, ғ, д, е, ё, ж, з, и, й, к, қ, л, м, н, ң, о, ө, п, р, с, т, у, ұ, ү, ф, х, һ, ц, ч, ш, щ, ъ, ы, і, ь, э, ю, я. The characters have capital and small forms.

Can I listen to how the Kazakh letters sound?

Yes. 41 of the 42 signs on this page have sound: click a character to hear it. The sound works on any phone, and nothing needs to be installed.

How long does it take to learn the Kazakh alphabet?

A few characters a day — one to two weeks, if you come back to what you covered. The whole alphabet crammed in an evening is remembered for an evening: without reviews the next day and three days later, the characters are almost entirely gone.

Where to start: letters or words?

With the letters. A word in an unfamiliar script cannot be read at all, and a word card tells you no more than a picture.

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