Kazakh

Yes — Kazakhstan officially announced a phased transition from Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet starting in the late 2010s, with the original target of completion by 2025 since revised. The new Latin alphabet has gone through several revisions to settle on diacritic conventions for Kazakh-specific sounds. As of the mid-2020s, Cyrillic remains in dominant everyday use while Latin is rolling into education and signage.

Kazakhstan as the official language, with around 11 million native speakers. Substantial Kazakh communities live in northwestern China (the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, where Kazakh is written in a Perso-Arabic script), western Mongolia (Bayan-Ölgii province), Russia, and Uzbekistan. The Kazakh diaspora extends through Turkey, Germany, and the United States.

Both are Kipchak Turkic and quite closely related. Kazakh and Kyrgyz are mutually intelligible with some effort — closer to each other than either is to Turkish or Uzbek. They share grammatical structure, similar vocabulary, and parallel histories of Cyrillic-era script use. The two are recognized as separate national languages of their respective countries.

Kazakh has full Turkic-style vowel harmony based on a front/back distinction (and a secondary rounded/unrounded contrast in some suffixes). Suffixes shift their vowels to match the root: the plural is -lar after back-vowel roots, -ler after front-vowel ones. The system is more fully preserved than in Uzbek (which lost much of its harmony through Persian contact) and behaves similarly to Turkish.

The script situation (Cyrillic shifting to Latin) is the clearest source of friction. Grammar is agglutinative with strict suffix order, vowel harmony, and SOV word order — different from English but regular. Vocabulary draws from Turkic, Persian, Arabic, and Russian sources. There are few English cognates outside recent technological loans. Most learners describe Kazakh as moderately difficult, similar to other major Turkic languages.