Tokayev at the Qazaq Tili society congress: 71 percent of schoolchildren now study in Kazakh

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev addressed the 10th congress of the international Qazaq Tili society on 10 November. The society was founded in 1989 by academicians Abduali Kaidar and Umirzak Aitbaiuly, and the congress took place shortly before the 35th anniversary of independence.

According to the figures Tokayev gave, 71 percent of schoolchildren now study in Kazakh this year. Of more than 6,000 books published last year, 70 percent were in Kazakh, and 63 of the 71 films shot in Kazakhstan this year are in Kazakh. Kazakh-language users of one Yandex app grew by 30 percent compared with 2025.

He called for a national digital archive of Kazakh heritage, digitisation of books, archives and audiovisual material, and more Kazakh-medium teaching in engineering, medicine, law, economics and IT. The current orthography dictionary dates from 1983, so the spelling norms should be revised by the end of next year. Bilingual and multilingual dictionaries with French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Persian were also proposed.

The president added that the growth of Kazakh should not come at the expense of other languages, and quoted a saying attributed to writer Abish Kekilbayev: “Respect for the language is respect for the country.” Under the society's “Dala Ormany” project, 5 million trees were planted on 400 hectares in a year.