Until recently the name of our people, language and country has almost always been spelled in English as “Kazakh”, but nowadays “Qazaq” is becoming used as well. “What’s the deal with the different spellings?”, you might wonder.
It all depends on which language you use as the source of your transliteration (conversion of a text from one script to another). For the majority of the 20th century, our country was ruled by the Soviet government, and Russian was the dominant language, in fact enormous efforts were made to wipe out our native language. Anyway, in Russian, the term is КАЗАХ, which gets transliterated into Latin/English as KAZAKH. And since all decisions were made by people whose main language was Russian, that’s the transliteration that went out into the world. Even today, our passports say “Kazakhstan”, one of the countless legacies of that time.
Now, if we look at my native language, the spelling is ҚАЗАҚ, and for it the correct transliteration is QAZAQ. The first and last letter are the same letter Қ, and it’s the letter Қ, not К.
I think, if you’re going to speak about a specific people, language or country, it makes sense to use the native language as the source language for transliteration, hence, my usage of Qazaq.
