Consonants

The following chart depicts the consonant inventory of standard Kazakh;^[8] many of the sounds, however, are allophones of other sounds or appear only in recent loanwords. The 18 consonant phonemes listed by Vajda are without parentheses—since these are phonemes, their listed place and manner of articulation are very general, and will vary from what is shown. (/t͡s/ rarely appears in normal speech.) Kazakh has 19 native consonant phonemes; these are the stops /p, b, t, d, k, ɡ, q/, fricatives /s, z, ɕ, ʑ, ʁ/, nasals /m, n, ŋ/, liquids /ɾ, l/, and two glides /w, j/.^[9] The sounds /f, v, χ, h, t͡s, t͡ɕ/ are found only in loanwords. /ʑ/ is heard as an alveolopalatal affricate [d͡ʑ] in the Kazakh dialects of Uzbekistan and Xinjiang, China. The sounds [q] and [ʁ] may be analyzed as allophones of /k/ and /ɡ/ in words with back vowels, but exceptions occur in loanwords.

• All the phonemes in the table are their pronunciation in front vowels environment. Consonants [k], [ɡ], [ɕ], [ʑ] also have back allophones [q], [ʁ], [ʃ], [ʒ] correspondingly.  
• All nasals agree in place of articulation with the following plosives.
• Voicing distinction only exists word-internally.
• The chart does not include loan sounds such as /f/, /t͡s/, /x/ etc. that are substituted in native speech.
• Voiced obstruents syllable-finally become devoiced.^[7]

Vowels

Kazakh has a system of 12 phonemic vowels, 3 of which are diphthongs. The rounding contrast and /æ/ generally only occur as phonemes in the first syllable of a word, but do occur later allophonically; see the section on harmony below for more information. Moreover, the /æ/ sound has been included artificially due to the influence of Arabic, Persian and, later, Tatar languages during the Islamic period.^[11]

According to Vajda, the front/back quality of vowels is actually one of neutral versus retracted tongue root.^[10]

Phonetic values are paired with the corresponding character in Kazakh's Cyrillic and current Latin alphabets.

• There is significant debate over the Kazakh vowel phoneme chart, but all analysis agrees on an eight-vowel system with [æ] being artificially added due to Arab and Persian influence.
• The vowel /e̞/ is often pronounced /je̞/ at the beginning of the word, with exceptional root e-. Urban Kazakh tends to palatalize all /e̞/, caused by Russian influence.^[12]

Vowel harmony

Kazakh exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony (also called soft-hard harmony), and arguably weakened rounding harmony which is implied in the first syllable of the word. All vowels after the first rounded syllable are the subject to this harmony with the exception of /ɑ/, and in the following syllables, e.g. өмір [ø̞mʏr], қосы [qɒso]. Notably, urban Kazak tends to violate rounding harmony, as well as pronouncing Russian borrowings against the rules.^[12]

Stress

Most words in Kazakh are stressed in the last syllable, except:^[13]

• When counting objects, numbers are stressed in the first syllable, but stressed in the last syllable in collective numbers suffixed by -eu (bıreu, altau from bır, alty):

bır, ekı, üş, tört, bes, alty, jetı, ...

'one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, ...'

• Definite and negative pronouns are stressed in the first syllable:

bärıne eşkımge

'to everyone, to no one'

Orthography

Nowadays, Kazakh is mostly written in the Cyrillic script, with an Arabic-based alphabet being used by minorities in China. Since October 26, 2017, via Presidential Decree 569, Kazakhstan will adopt the Latin script by 2025.^[14][15]

Cyrillic script was created to better merge the Kazakh language with other languages of the USSR, hence it has some controversial letter readings.

The letter У after a consonant represents a combination of sounds і /ɪ/, ү /ʏ/, ы /ɤ̞/, ұ /o̞/ with glide /w/,^[16] e.g. кіру [kɪɾɪw], су [so̞w], көру [kø̞ɾʏw], атысу [ɑtɤ̞sɤ̞w]. Ю undergoes the same process but with /j/ at the beginning.

The letter И represents a combination of sounds i /ɪ/, ы /ɤ̞/ + glide /j/,^[16] e.g. тиіс /tɪjɪs/, оқиды /ɒqɤ̞jdɤ̞/

The letter Я and often digraph ЙЯ represent two sounds /jɑ/ and /jæ/ depending on the harmony.

The letter Щ represents /ʃ.ʃ/ in words of Turkic origin, e.g. ащы /ɑʃ.ʃɤ̞/

Meanwhile, the letters В, Ё, Ф, Х, Һ, Ц, Ч, ъ, ь, Э are only used in loan words, mostly Russian. They are often substituted in spoken Kazakh.

Nouns

Kazakh has no noun class or gender system. Nouns are declined for number (singular or plural) and one of seven cases:

• Nominative
• Accusative
• Genitive
• Dative
• Locative
• Ablative
• Instrumental^[11]

The suffix for case is placed before the suffix for number.

Pronouns

There are eight personal pronouns in Kazakh:

The declension of the pronouns is outlined in the following chart. Singular pronouns exhibit irregularities, while plural pronouns do not. Irregular forms are highlighted in bold.^[18]

In addition to the pronouns, there are several more sets of morphemes dealing with person.^[18]

Adjectives

Adjectives in Kazakh are not declined for any grammatical category of the modified noun. Being a head-final language, adjectives are always placed before the noun that they modify. Kazakh has two varieties of adjectives:

• Qualitative – used to describe properties of the noun, such as color
• Relational – adjectives formed from words from other parts of speech^[11]

Verbs

Kazakh may express different combinations of tense, aspect and mood through the use of various verbal morphology or through a system of auxiliary verbs, many of which might better be considered light verbs. The present tense is a prime example of this; progressive tense in Kazakh is formed with one of four possible auxiliaries. These auxiliaries otyr 'sit', tūr 'stand', jür 'go' and jat 'lie', encode various shades of meaning of how the action is carried out and also interact with the lexical semantics of the root verb: telic and non-telic actions, semelfactives, durative and non-durative, punctual, etc. There are selectional restrictions on auxiliaries: motion verbs, such as бару 'go' and келу 'come' may not combine with otyr. Any verb, however, can combine with jat 'lie' to get a progressive tense meaning.^[18]

While it is possible to think that different categories of aspect govern the choice of auxiliary, it is not so straightforward in Kazakh. Auxiliaries are internally sensitive to the lexical semantics of predicates, for example, verbs describing motion:^[18]

In addition to the complexities of the progressive tense, there are many auxiliary-converb pairs that encode a range of aspectual, modal, volitional, evidential and action- modificational meanings. For example, the pattern verb + köru, with the auxiliary verb köru 'see', indicates that the subject of the verb attempted or tried to do something (compare the Japanese てみる temiru construction).^[18]