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Language guide

Kazakh Names: Meanings, Origins & Traditions

Kazakh names are listed here in Kazakh Cyrillic, the alphabet used in Kazakhstan, together with any Latin spelling that our sources record. Many Kazakh names are compounds of native words, such as ай 'moon' or жан 'soul', and others come from Arabic and Persian. Kazakhstan has decided to move from Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet, a transition now scheduled to finish by 2031, so Latin spellings of the same name can still vary.
Қазақ тілі
Kipchak branch of the Turkic language family
Published names
1555
Scripts in our data
Cyrillic, Latin
ISO 639-1
kk

Browse Kazakh names

1 name

  • Jibek

    “silk”
    From Proto-Turkic · Kazakh, Kyrgyz
    Girl2 syllablesDocumented

How Kazakh names are written

Kazakh Cyrillic adds letters such as ә, ғ, қ, ң, ө, ұ, ү, һ and і to the Russian alphabet. A 2017 decree started a move to Latin script, later pushed back to 2031. Kazakhs in China, Iran and Afghanistan use an Arabic-based script. Latin forms on this site are shown only where a source records them.

Where Kazakh names come from

A name used in Kazakh is not automatically Kazakh in origin. Here is how the documented origins of the Kazakh names published so far break down (a name with elements from two languages counts under both):

  • Turkic
    722
  • Arabic
    557
  • Persian
    448
  • Kipchak
    65
  • Hebrew
    26
  • Greek
    17
  • Mongolic
    15

Counted from 1555 published entries. Each name page explains its own etymology with sources.

Kazakh names by meaning

Kazakh belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages, together with Kyrgyz, Tatar and Bashkir. Related languages share many words, but a name is listed under a language only when it is documented there.

Other languages: Turkish · Uyghur · Uzbek · Azerbaijani · Turkmen · Tajik

References for this page

  1. Wikipedia contributors. Kazakh alphabets. Wikimedia Foundation, revision 1381145820. Accessed 2026-10-28. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.
  2. Wikipedia contributors. Turkic languages. Wikimedia Foundation, revision 1377797900. Accessed 2026-10-28. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.