In Kazakhstan in December 2025, the administrator of the Chimbulak ski resort was dismissed after she asked a customer, who had requested service in Kazakh, to repeat their request in Russian. The Qazaq Coffee café in Astana closed after a single 2GIS review mentioning the absence of a menu in the national language. These are not isolated stories. This is the new reality of doing business in Kazakhstan — where the language question has become one of the biggest reputational and legal risks.
The Law: What It Says About Language in Business
Let's start with the hard legal facts.
Article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan establishes: the state language is Kazakh. Russian is officially used alongside Kazakh in state organisations.
Law "On Consumer Rights Protection," Article 24, Paragraph 1: the seller (service provider) is obliged to provide information about goods, services and themselves in both Kazakh and Russian.
If you have a website where you inform consumers about goods or services — it must be in Kazakh and Russian. Not "should be" — must be. A complaint to the Committee on Consumer Rights Protection can result in a formal notice and a fine.
Real Cases: How a Single Language Destroyed Businesses
English: How Much Business Loses Without It
There's another dimension to this. Kazakhstan is actively developing international tourism and attracting foreign investment. In 2025, more than 9 million foreign tourists visited Kazakhstan. Every one of them at some point tried to find information online. Most ended up on Booking.com, Tripadvisor and Google Maps — because Kazakh websites didn't provide information in a language they could understand.
- Restaurants and cafés. All foreign visitors to a city end up at the five venues with a decent English website. The other 95 don't get that traffic.
- Premium-segment property developers. Expats are a significant share of apartment buyers in Almaty and Astana.
- Medical centres. Medical tourism is a growing market. Without an English website, you're simply not in it.
- IT services. Export work and engaging with international clients requires an English-language company presence.
How It's Usually Done — and Why It Doesn't Work
How to Implement Multilingual Properly
- Separate URLs — /kz/, /ru/, /en/ for each language version of every page.
- Hreflang tags — each page's HTML references the other language versions. Google uses this to serve the right version to each user.
- Full interface translation — not just the main body text, but buttons, forms, validation errors, subheadings and email notifications.
- Smart language switching — from any page, the switcher takes the user to that same page in the desired language version, not back to the homepage.
- Separate SEO fields — title and meta description written specifically for the real search queries of each audience.
- Localised forms — the WhatsApp link dynamically generates a greeting in the appropriate language: Kazakh "Қайырлы күн!", Russian "Добрый день!", English "Good afternoon!"
Multilingual capability is not a bonus feature — it's a baseline requirement for any serious digital product operating in Kazakhstan in 2026. Kazakh: by law. Russian: by market reality. English: by ambition to operate beyond the country's borders.
Three Languages Built Into Every Project by Default
Amanix builds three languages into the architecture of every project as a matter of principle. It's not an optional extra at additional cost — it's part of our baseline standard.
We implement this technically via separate URLs: /kz/, /ru/, /en/. Each language version is a fully self-contained page with its own SEO fields. Hreflang tags are applied automatically. All interface elements are translated into all three languages. Language switching is intelligent: from any page, the user is taken to the same page in the selected locale.