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 ...

A decision reportedly adopted by Kazakh-language primary schools near Kazakhstan’s capital to allow instruction in some classrooms to take place in Russian is angering local champions of the native ...

Kazakhstan’s planned transition to a Latin alphabet is intertwined with issues of national identity, geopolitical shifts, and post-colonial discourse. In Kazakhstan, talk about switching from the ...

Kazakhstan embraced independence 30 years ago, yet is still actively nation-building around language, shared history, and cultural diversity with the over 100 ethnic groups living in the vast Central ...