Short answers, pulled from the story.
Kazakh belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic language family. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz, and Karakalpak, and the Kipchak branch was largely consolidated during the period of the Golden Horde.
Modern Kazakh is thought to have taken shape around 1465 AD, during the formation of the Kazakh Khanate. It descends from both Chagatay Turkic as spoken by the Timurids and Kipchak Turkic as spoken in the Golden Horde.
Kazakh has nearly ten million speakers in Kazakhstan, nearly two million in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang, China, and approximately 472,000 in Russia according to the 2010 Russian census. Additional speakers live in Mongolia, Germany, Turkey, and across the former Soviet Union.
On the 26th of October 2017, President Nursultan Nazarbayev issued Presidential Decree 569 ordering the transition from Cyrillic to Latin script. The Cyrillic alphabet was originally designed for Slavic languages and had to be modified for Kazakh; the Latin transition is scheduled to be phased in from 2023 to 2031.
Kazakhs used the Arabic script until approximately 1929. In the early 1900s, activist Akhmet Baitursynuly reformed the Kazakh-Arabic alphabet, but Soviet authorities subsequently imposed a Latin script and later, in the 1940s, switched the official script to Cyrillic.
Kazakh exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony, meaning the vowels within a word align to a shared phonetic quality set by the first syllable. There is also a weakened rounding harmony resembling that of Kyrgyz; loanwords from Russian, Persian, and Arabic are the main exceptions to these patterns.