A couple of comments on the article: 1) The article doesn't mention the latinization scheme that was initially proposed last year by the committee of linguists

A couple of comments on the article: 1) The article doesn't mention the latinization scheme that was initially proposed last year by the committee of linguists that was tasked to study this issue. Their proposal used only the 26 letters of the English alphabet; since Kazakh has more than 26 sounds, the additional sounds would be represented by digraphs (pairs of letters). President Nazarbayev over-rode the committee, and proposed the "apostrophe" version (mentioned in the article). After much outcry, the final version (with diacritical marks) was adopted. So here is the evolution of the letter currently written with the Kazakh Cyrillic "ә": ae, then a', then á. Note, by the way, that "ә" does not exist in the Russian version of Cyrillic; in order to write Kazakh in Cyrillic, additional letters needed to be introduced back in the 1930s. My opinion: the digraph proposal was the most forward-looking. I'm guessing that most young Kazakhs will end up skipping the diacritical marks when they send text messages, whereas they would have used the digraphs. 2) The article is a bit confusing, in that it mixes up two different initiatives. The first initiative (the main focus of the article) is to convert Kazakh to the Latin alphabet. The second is to reduce the use of Russian in favor of Kazakh. (At some point, President Nazarbayev expressed the goal of educating all children in 3 languages: Kazakh, English, and Russian). 3) The article (and most of the comments) seem to be focused on the question of whether latinization would improve Kazakhstan's economic ties with European and Turkic nations. But Kazakhstan's most important neighbor is China, and it is safe to assume that more Chinese are familiar with the Latin than with the Cyrillic alphabet, so latinization makes sense in this regard as well.