ASTANA, December 14 (RIA Novosti) - Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Friday instructed his government to start preparation for transferring the national language to the Latin script by 2025.
“This will help not only to develop the Kazakh language but will also turn it into a language of modern communication,” Nazarbayev said.
Kazakh currently uses the Cyrillic alphabet, introduced in 1940 when it was a Soviet republic.
It replaced the Uniform Turkic Alphabet that had been used in the USSR from 1927 to 1940.
Kazakh speakers in countries that use the Latin script also use a modified Latin alphabet based on the Turkish alphabet.
The Kazakh government declared the need to replace Cyrillic with Latin as part of a national modernization program.
Some websites of the government of Kazakhstan are already available in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
