Facts about Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is one of those countries that you don't hear too much about but it's a wild country filled with adventure and today we're gonna learn about how amazing this place is.

Hey everybody, how is it going? Hope you guys are all having a fantastic day.

And before I get into that, I want to know from you guys what type of government do you think is in Kazakhstan? But let's get started and let's look at some of the basics.

Kazakhstan is actually called the Republic of Kazakhstan, which gives you an idea or a clue of what type of government it is. And if we look at good old Google Maps, thank you very much Google, as much as I disagree with your monetization percentage share 'cause you know YouTube is part of Google, I'm not gonna get into that. But getting back to Kazakhstan, it is dead center in Central Asia and it has a land size of 2,724,900 kilometers which makes it ranked ninth in the world.

That being also said, Kazakhstan uses the metric system. Don't ask me when that came into effect, it did at some point, I don't know when. However, Kazakhstan is also classified as the largest landlocked country which some of you guys may be like, "Ah, wait no Dave, it's not landlocked because it's got the shoreline of the Caspian Sea so it doesn't count."

Well, by definition, a landlocked country is a country that is surrounded by other countries or by a closed-off sea, in which the Caspian Sea is closed off to the ocean. Currently, it has five countries that surround it: these are the nations of Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and the one hiding off in the corner which I almost missed, and that is Turkmenistan. Russia, however, has the biggest border of this. But one thing to be noted when it comes to its coastline, it comes in at over 1,894 kilometers.

Also, because it's classified as a sea and not an ocean, that means Kazakhstan does not have a maritime status at all. And also, side note, although it does have that coastline, only about 1.7 percent of the entire country has fresh water.

Now let's jump over to let's look at the population. Currently, it is estimated that there is about 18,448,600 people, making this country ranked 19th largest in the world. And by that, I mean largest as in population. I don't mean the people of Kazakhstan are giants, no, they're just like everybody else. Also, with that being said, the last census was done in 2017 in which it was slightly over 18 million people.

With that, however, this country actually ranks pretty low in terms of density. As a matter of fact, because of the population with land size, there is about seven people per kilometer square, making the country ranked 236th. Which also makes me wonder, what kind of people are in Kazakhstan?

In today's world, about 65.5 percent of the people identify as Kazakh, where 21.6 percent identifies Russian. After that, you've also got the Uzbek, Ukrainians, and Germans are surprisingly in there as well as Tatar and many others. And to dive a little further into that, when it comes to religion, about 65 percent of the total population identifies as Muslim, whereas about 26 percent identifies as Christian, which makes me wonder how many internal conflicts are there within that country. Hopefully not a lot.

Now, Kazakhstan has also been around since 1465. Back then, it was known as the Kazakh Khanate, which evolved out of the Golden Horde, which was a khanate that evolved out of the Mongol Empire. By the way, if you don't know what a khanate is, don't worry about it, it's basically another form of government, it's just not used more in the West.

Speaking of governments, Kazakhstan identifies as a unitary parliamentary constitutional republic. God, that was hard to say. So if you got that one right, awesome. This basically means that Kazakhstan has one president currently as of the time of recording this video, it is Nursultan Nazarbayev, and there is also a prime minister who currently is Askar Mamin. For the legislature, they also have an upper house known as the Senate and a lower house known as the Mazhilis.

Keep in mind, it wasn't always like this. Kazakhstan was a part of the Soviet Union and Soviet Russia, which was communist. This was obviously until 1991 when it split off because the Soviet Union collapsed. Shortly after that, 1995 Kazakhstan got its own constitution. It's kind of interesting if you think about it, a lot of ex-Soviet, you know, states and countries, they don't really have communism anymore. I guess it wasn't that popular.

In today's world, the capital of the country is Nursultan. It is the second largest city with over a million people. The biggest, of course, is Almaty which was the capital from 1991 to 1997 and currently, it has a population of over 2 million people, which actually has about 8 percent of the entire country's population. Keep in mind, an actual recording of how many people live in the metropolitan area has not been taken so it's kind of a loose figure.

It's also important to note that the country has had two capitals in its short time since 1991. Nursultan was originally called Astana until it was renamed in 1998. Oh, I also forgot to mention the languages of the country. You've got Kazakh and Russian as the two official languages. Russian is the co-official language. But one of the most interesting things is that Kazakhstan has its own unique form of scripture or writing. It's kind of a combination between Russian Cyrillic and of course, Latin and Arabic scripture. It's a little bit different.

And as a matter of fact, for a long time they used the Cyrillic alphabet, but as recent as, a matter of fact, I think 2017 or 18, things have changed with its own alphabet. This is because the government made revisions to the scripture that were put immediately into effect. Some of these revisions were things like apostrophes being kicked out for things like diacritical marks.