Rationale
Starting point: a Kazakh, not Russian, letter set
Most Kazakh Latin proposals, including the official one, start from the full 42-letter Cyrillic alphabet used in Kazakhstan today, then try to find a Latin letter for every single one of those 42 letters, including the ones that only exist to write Russian loanwords: В, Ё, Ц, Ч, Щ, Ъ, Ь, Э, Ю, Я, Ф.
This proposal starts from a different question: which letters does Kazakh itself actually need? The answer is 31 Cyrillic letters, none of which are Russian-only. Everything downstream, including the size and shape of the Latin alphabet, follows from that smaller set.
Why drop those eleven letters
Э is redundant with Е in practice.
Removing these letters is not a loss of information for Kazakh; it is a removal of letters that were never doing work for Kazakh in the first place. A side effect is that a handful of established loanwords and calques, such as "яғни", no longer have a one-letter spelling for their first sound and must be respelled (for example, "iagni"), because that sound was only ever needed for imported vocabulary.
Merging И/Й and Х/Һ
Two more mergers happen at the Cyrillic-to-Latin step itself, on top of the removals above:
- И, Й → İ i: rarely contrast in the same position; treating them as one letter matches how many speakers already use them.
- Х, Һ → H h: Һ is confined to a small set of Arabic-Persian loanwords and is not consistently distinguished from Х in everyday speech.
This brings the alphabet down from 31 Cyrillic letters to 29 Latin letters.
Handling sounds that have no letter
Where a word historically needed a я/ё/ю-type glide, it is written as J j followed by a vowel (ja, jo, ju), using letters the alphabet already has rather than adding a new one.
Loanwords and foreign proper names are not transliterated letter-for-letter from their Cyrillic spelling. They are respelled using the available 29 letters, the same way any language adapts foreign words to its own orthography. "Wikipedia", for example, becomes "Uikipedia", not a direct copy of a Cyrillic transliteration.
Distinguishing İ i from I ı
Even after the И/Й merge, Kazakh still needs to keep И/Й apart from І, because they belong to opposite vowel-harmony classes. The alphabet borrows the Turkish-style dotted/dotless pair to do this: İ i (dotted) for И/Й, and I ı (dotless) for І. This is a well-established convention in Turkic Latin orthographies and is supported by existing Turkic keyboard layouts.
Comparison with the official system
The official 2021 Kazakh Latin alphabet keeps all 42 Cyrillic letters in scope and spends significant design effort finding Latin equivalents (or digraphs) for Russian-only letters. This proposal argues that effort is misplaced: those letters do not belong in a Kazakh alphabet at all, and removing them up front produces a smaller, more consistent Latin alphabet without sacrificing any native Kazakh sound.
Conclusion
This alphabet is built in two steps: first reduce the Cyrillic reference set to what Kazakh phonology actually requires, then map that set to Latin letters with only two narrow, well-motivated mergers. The result is a 29-letter alphabet that covers every native Kazakh sound, uses standard Unicode characters with established Turkic-language support, and does not carry over the digraph or diacritic clutter needed to represent Russian-only letters.