Asking a Question in Kazakh

Kazakh grammar for beginners · One small word at the end, and nothing else moves

English rearranges a sentence to ask a question: "this is a shop" becomes "is this a shop?". Kazakh does not touch the sentence at all. It puts a particle after the last word — a particle being a word with no meaning of its own, there only to do a grammatical job — and that is the question asked.

The particle is written separately, and it has six shapes, chosen by the sound in front of it.

The particle goes at the end

The word it follows need not be the one the question is really about. Düken alys pa? (Дүкен алыс па?) asks about the shop, but the particle stands after alys (алыс) "far" — and it is alys (алыс) that decides which shape the particle takes.

The six shapes

The word in front ends in	Back vowels (a, o, ū, y (а, о, ұ, ы))	Front vowels (ä, e, ı, ö, ü (ә, е, і, ө, ү))
a vowel — or r (р), l (л), i (й), u (у)	ma (ма)	me (ме)
z (з), j (ж), m (м), n (н), ñ (ң)	ba (ба)	be (бе)
a voiceless consonant: k, q, p, s, t, f, h, ş (к, қ, п, с, т, ф, х, ш) — and also b, v, g, d (б, в, г, д)	pa (па)	pe (пе)

The same three-way switch runs through the first-person ending, -myn (-мын) / -byn (-бын) / -pyn (-пын), with one difference: after m (м), n (н) and ñ (ң) that ending keeps its m (м) — Men ğalymmyn (Мен ғалыммын) "I am a scientist" — where the particle turns to b (б).

The particle goes after a personal ending, not instead of it

When the sentence carries a personal ending, the ending does not move. It stays on the noun, and the particle follows it.

Answering: iä (иә) and joq (жоқ)

iä (иә) is "yes" and joq (жоқ) is "no". What follows either of them is an ordinary sentence, negated with emes (емес) when the answer is no.

A question word replaces the particle

A sentence that asks who, what or when does not take the particle. The question word stands where the answer will stand, and takes a personal ending if the sentence needs one, exactly as a noun there would.

The two commonest are kım (кім) "who", used of people, and ne (не) "what", used of everything else.

The question words

Word	Meaning	Turkish equivalent
kım (кім)	who	kim
ne (не)	what	ne
qandai (қандай)	what kind of	nasıl, ne tür
qalai (қалай)	how	nasıl
qanşa (қанша), neşe (неше)	how many, how much	kaç, ne kadar
qaşan (қашан)	when	ne zaman
qaida (қайда)	where	nerede, nereye
nege (неге)	why	neden, niçin, niye

qandai (қандай) and qalai (қалай) both come out as nasıl, and they are not interchangeable: qandai (қандай) asks what a thing is like and stands with a noun — Aua raiy qandai? (Ауа райы қандай?) "how is the weather?" — while qalai (қалай) asks the way an action is carried out, and stands with a verb.

The particle matches; the ending does not

Turkish asks with mı, a separate word at the end of the sentence, and so does Kazakh: Elma iyi mi? against Alma jaqsy ma? (Алма жақсы ма?). Turkish changes only the vowel of that word — mı, mi, mu, mü — and never the m (м). Kazakh changes the consonant too, which is where ba (ба) and pa (па) come from.

The personal ending then goes to a different place in each language. Turkish moves it onto the particle, Siz öğrenci misiniz?, leaving the noun bare. Kazakh leaves it on the noun and the particle follows: Sız studentsız be? (Сіз студентсіз бе?).

Keep going

← Saying What Something Is Not · Having and Not Having →

All Kazakh lessons

• The Alphabet — Read Kazakh without learning Cyrillic
• How the Letters Behave — The things spelling does not tell you
• Turkish ↔ Kazakh Sound Laws — Six rules that unlock hundreds of words for free
• Vowel Harmony — The same system as Turkish — with one simplification
• Numbers — One to a thousand, and what a number does to the word after it
• Days of the Week — Saturday, and the days counted off it
• Months — Twelve names to learn outright
• Seasons — The four, and the weather that comes with them
• The Plural — One suffix, six written shapes
• Body Parts — From the top of the head to the sole of the foot, and the organs in between
• Personal Pronouns — Four ways to say "you", one word for "he" and "she"
• Possessive — The ending goes on the thing owned
• Family and Kinship — Lineages, generational ties, and reciprocal kinship
• The Copula — Saying "I am a teacher" with no verb at all
• Saying What Something Is Not — One extra word, and the personal ending moves onto it
• Having and Not Having — No verb "to have" — only "there is" and "there is not"
• Where: the Locative — Location and time: one ending
• Where to: the Dative — Direction, destination, recipient, and purpose
• Where from: the Ablative — Starting points, origins, and standards of comparison
• Whose: the Genitive — Possession, definite noun phrases, and relationships
• What: the Accusative — The thing an action is done to — marked only when it is a particular one
• With: the Instrumental — Who you did it with, and what you did it with
• All Seven Together — What each ending marks, and every shape it takes
• Spatial Postpositions and Relational Nouns — Expressing position, direction and time with postpositions and relational nouns
• Verbs, Infinitives and Commands — From dictionary forms in {{-у}} to bare stems, commands and polite requests
• Simple Present Tense — Habitual actions, general facts and future intentions in {{-а / -е / -й}}
• Simple Past Tense — Witnessed and completed past actions in {{-ды / -ді / -ты / -ті}}
• Distant Past and Past Participle — Experienced past actions in {{-ған / -ген}} and conversational negation with {{жоқ}}
• Habitual Past and the "Used-To" Aspect — Expressing past routines in {{-атын / -етін / -йтын / -йтін}} and habitual participles
• Reported and Narrative Past — Hearsay, indirect evidence and surprise discoveries in {{-ыпты / -іпті / -пты / -пті}}
• The Present Continuous Tense — Ongoing actions and the four auxiliary verbs of physical stance
• Future Tenses — Definite intentions in {{-мақ / -мек}} and probable futures in {{-ар / -ер / -р}}
• Desires, Intentions and Optatives — Expressing wishes in {{-ғым келеді}} and making proposals in {{-айын / -айық}}
• Ability and Inability — Expressing "can" and "cannot" using converbs in {{-а / -е / -й}} and {{алу}}
• Conditionals and "If" Clauses — Real and hypothetical conditions in {{-са / -се}} and counterfactuals with {{еді}}
• Sequential Converbs and Action Chains — Linking consecutive actions in {{-ып / -іп / -п}} without repeating conjunctions
• Causative, Passive and Reflexive Verb Voices — Grammatical voice derivations in {{-дыр / -қыз / -т}}, {{-ыл / -іл}} and {{-ыс / -іс}}
• Necessity, Obligation and Possibility — Expressing "must", "need to" and "might" with {{керек}}, {{қажет}} and {{мүмкін}}
• Verb Differences & False Friends — How common Kazakh and Turkish verbs parted ways over time

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