Variabilität in der Toponymie: Almaty vs. Alma-Ata

Abstract

With gaining the independence and the emergence of a new state the linguistic situation in Kazakhstan has been changed. The restoration and return of historical names, the fi xing of unifi ed rules of the transferring of Kazakh toponyms into other languages became the basis of national onomastic policy of independent Kazakhstan. After the law “On languages in the Republic of Kazakhstan” adopted in 1997 the activity on improvement of orthographic norms and formulation of new rules of transferring geographical names from Kazakh into Russian started. As a result of these acts many distorted names of inhabited localities and administrative-territorial units are gradually being put into an appropriate norm. Many of them are still to be corrected according to new “Law on Administrative - Territorial Structure of the Republic of Kazakhstan” (December 8, 1993.) and Presidential Decree (December 29, 1995.), Government Resolution (March 5, 1996.) where the rules on Russian transferring of Kazakh onyms were approved. Due to such activity to former capital of Kazakhstan Alma-Ata was returned its original name Almaty. Thus, in our article we decided to give our point of view on some issues relating to grammatical adaptation of toponym Almaty in Russian language.