ID : N-550 Date : 2017/10/30 - 20:40
(Persia Digest) – The history of the Persian language goes back a long way in Kazakhstan, where Persian studies in its universities have been offered for three decades.
The main propellant of the language has been travel and trade between Iranian and Kazakh peoples leading to cultural exchanges between the two.
The prevalence of Persian in this region is so great that many of their history books have been written in Persian and it is not possible to learn the history of Kazakhstan without knowing the Persian language.
Many of the idioms have found their way from Persian into Kazakh literature and, according to Kazakh researchers, there are around three thousand Persian words in the Kazakh Turkic language.
Most Kazakh poets, scholars, and authors are familiar with the Persian language and the great Persian poets, such as Hafez, Sa’di, Ferdowsi, and Khayyam Neishaburi are quite well-known here. Parts of their “Divan” or entire poetry books have been translated into Kazakh and Russian.
Once the USSR was established in 1922, its policies of cutting ties between these areas and their eastern neighbors, including Iran, created an interval in the promulgation of the Persian language in these lands. After the breakup of the USSR, the Kazakh people showed an interest in Iran and Persian. Many of its universities offer the course now and students learn it as a second language.
A number of these universities include the Farabi Kazakh National University (Almaty), Kazakkh Ablai Khan University, Teacher Training University, L.N.Gumilyov Eurasian National University (Astana), Kazakh-Arab University (Shymkent), Sh Yesenov - Caspian State University of Technology and Engineering, Haydar Mohammad University (Taraz), etc. Persian is also taught in some schools in Almati.
It should be noted that Kazakhstan is in Central Asia and its official language is Kazakh and Russian.