Character mapping

Merged letters

Two Cyrillic distinctions are not carried over into the Latin alphabet:

• İ i covers both И (vowel /i/) and Й (glide /j/). In practice the two rarely contrast in the same position.
• H h covers both Х (/χ/) and Һ (/h/). Һ occurs only in a small set of Arabic-Persian loanwords, and many speakers no longer distinguish it from Х.

Dropped letters

The following Cyrillic letters exist only to write Russian loanwords and have no place in native Kazakh phonology, so they are dropped entirely:

• Where a native word would historically use a soft-sign or a я/ё/ю-type glide, it is written with the existing letters: J j plus a vowel (ja, jo, ju).
• Loanwords and foreign proper names are not transliterated letter-for-letter; they are respelled with the available letters (for example Wikipedia becomes Uikipedia, not a direct copy of the Cyrillic spelling).

Distinct Latin letters for I

The alphabet uses the Turkish-style dotted/dotless pair:

• İ i (dotted) for И/Й
• I ı (dotless) for І

This keeps the two Kazakh front/back distinctions typographically separate even though both are rendered as a plain "i" in casual, non-Turkic fonts.