Kazakh grammar for beginners · The same system as Turkish — with one simplification
Kazakh suffixes change their vowel to match the root, exactly as in Turkish. The front/back split works identically. The good news: Kazakh spelling ignores rounding harmony, so most suffixes have two written forms where Turkish has four.
Vowel harmony is the Turkic norm, and Kazakh has it in full: a word consists of either back vowels or front vowels, not a mixture. Any suffix you attach must follow the root, exactly as in Turkish.
Put another way: if the first syllable of a native word has a back vowel, so does the second, and likewise for front vowels. That is the same instinct you already apply in Turkish without thinking about it.
| Kazakh | Turkish equivalent | |
|---|---|---|
| Front | ä, e, ı, ö, ü (ә, е, і, ө, ү) | e, i, ö, ü |
| Back | a, o, ū, y (а, о, ұ, ы) | a, o, u, ı |
Nine vowels in all — five front, four back — and the correspondence with Turkish is one-to-one. If you can hear Turkish harmony, you can hear Kazakh harmony. Note that u (у) and i (и) are deliberately absent: Kazakh has exactly these nine vowels, and u (у) and i (и) are each a vowel combined with a glide rather than a vowel in their own right — which is why they pattern with the consonants when a suffix is chosen.
oquşy оқушы
pupil · Turkish: öğrenci
Back-vowel root. Built from oqu (оқу) "to read", just as Turkish okur is built from okumak.
oquşylar оқушылар
pupils · Turkish: öğrenciler
Back root takes the back suffix -lar (-лар).
üi үй
house · Turkish: ev
Front-vowel root.
üiler үйлер
houses · Turkish: evler
Front root takes the front suffix -ler (-лер).
Turkish writes rounding harmony: the possessive is -ım / -im / -um / -üm, four forms chosen by both frontness and rounding.
Kazakh rounding harmony exists in speech but is not written. The possessive is spelled -ym (-ым) / -ım (-ім) — just two forms, chosen by frontness alone. Kazakhs pronounce something closer to a rounded vowel after a rounded root, but you never have to spell it.
Arabic, Persian and Russian loanwords break the rule and mix both sets: kıtap (кітап) "book" and qyzmet (қызмет) "service" from Arabic, botinka (ботинка) "boots" and kartoşka (картошка) "potato" from Russian.
Harmony still governs the suffixes you add to them, driven by the final syllable.