Principles

The eight rules QazaqKey's alphabet and converter are built against. Where a specific rule conflicts with one of these, the principle wins — see Why for the history behind them.

  1. 1

    Read clean, feel nice

    Text should look and read as clean as possible — the test is always "would a Kazakh reader want to read a whole page of this," not just "can it be decoded."

  2. 2

    Default-font friendly

    Every glyph renders in common system fonts with no special installation. Nothing in the alphabet requires a font a reader has to go find.

  3. 3

    Minimize diacritics

    Umlauts and other diacritics hurt readability and font support, so they're kept to a minimum. QazaqKey uses four: ä ö ü ń.

  4. 4

    Q only for emphasis

    Q marks the hard Қ when it matters; writing Kazakstan or Askar is perfectly acceptable everyday spelling. Q is also ugly in many fonts, which is reason enough on its own.

  5. 5

    English-keyboard fallback

    On any device without a Kazakh layout, typing on a plain English keyboard has to be a reasonable, understandable way to write.

  6. 6

    Small on-screen keyboards

    Few extra keys, so on-screen keyboard keys stay big enough to tap comfortably.

  7. 7

    Frequency-informed

    Choices are weighed against how often each Cyrillic letter actually occurs in real Kazakh text, not against how a letter looks in isolation.

  8. 8

    Authentic, not Russified

    Where the Soviet-era Cyrillic standard reflects Russian influence — e.g. keeping back vowels in "soft" loans like медаль — QazaqKey targets the pronunciation preserved by Kazakh communities outside Russian influence: Mongolia, China, Iran, Türkiye. медаль → medäl, not medal.

Two more, discovered while building it

Two further doctrines emerged from applying the principles above to real loanwords, and now govern every ambiguous case:

  • Assimilation depth, not origin. A word is treated by how thoroughly Kazakh has digested it, not by where it came from. сурет (from Arabic, centuries old) follows full native phonology; Конституция (a recent, still-unassimilated Russian term) does not — regardless of the fact both are, etymologically, loans.
  • A dual register, not one fixed spelling. Қ and Ғ can be written k/g (everyday) or q/ğ (reference) — both are correct. Everyday register is the clean, unintimidating default; reference register is for dictionaries, official text, and telling apart genuine minimal pairs like карта karta "map" vs. қарта qarta "a dish."

See Compare for how these principles play out against the current official Latin alphabet on real text.