Ethnic demography of Kazakhstan
On the other hand, ethnic Kazakhs and Uzbeks have been immigrating in large numbers to Kazakhstan ever since the collapse of the USSR. These immigrants come not only from the southern Central Asian states such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but also from the Kazakh dominated areas in Xinjiang and Mongolia. The Kazakh government is actively encouraging the settlement of these compatriots (known as "Oralman") in Slavic dominated North and East Kazakhstan as well as the German dominated Karaganda Region, in order to dilute the minority populations there. There is also a low intensity immigration of ethnic Slavs from the less tolerant neighboring nations like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan into Kazakhstan. An estimated 400,000 Uzbeks have migrated to Kazakhstan in recent years
Kazakh alphabets
As part of a modernization program, Decree 569 from Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev ordered the replacement of the Cyrillic script with a Latin script by 2025. In 2007, Nazarbayev said the transformation of the Kazakh alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin should not be rushed, as he noted: "For 70 years, the Kazakhstanis read and wrote in Cyrillic. More than 100 nationalities live in our state. Thus we need stability and peace. We should be in no hurry in the issue of alphabet transformation". In 2015, the Minister of Culture and Sports Arystanbek Mukhamediuly announced that a transition plan was underway, with specialists working on the orthography to accommodate the phonological aspects of the language. On April 12, 2017, President Nazarbayev published an article in state newspaper "Egemen Qazaqstan" announcing a switchover to the Latin alphabet by 2025, a decision implemented by decree. Nazarbayev argued that "Kazakh language and culture have been devastated" during the period of Soviet rule, and that ending the use of Cyrillic is useful in re-asserting national identity.
The new Latin alphabet is also a step to weaken the traditional Russian influence on the country, as the Russian language is the country's second official language.
The initial proposed Latin alphabet tried to avoid digraphs (such as "sh", "ch") and diacritics (such as "ä" or "ç"). In fact, President Nazarbayev had expressly stated that the new alphabet should contain "no hooks or superfluous dots". Instead, the new alphabet, which is based on a transliteration of Cyrillic into Latin letters, would have used apostrophes to denote those Kazakh letters where there was no direct Latin equivalent. It is similar to the Karakalpak Latin alphabet and the Uzbek alphabet.