Hey, Qazaq here. I personally prefer the Latin script and a spelling reform with it because it would bring us closer to Turkic countries that have already made the switch and, in my biased opinion, speed up our international integration, which is mostly Latin-based. Our current Cyrillic alphabet is just the copypasted Russian one + extra Qazaq letters which 1) bloats the alphabet, 2) leads to mispronunciation as people read letters the Russian way. I heavily dislike our orthographic choices too. Unfortunately, our current Latin variant still sucks and even the government seems to have swept the issue under the rug for now (which is a whole different topic).
Before that we used yañalif (Latin script of the 1920s-1930s), Arabic script (pre-revolution), and in the 8th century, Turkic runes, but there was no “Qazaq state” to speak of back then. I know you didn't really ask about the probability of these scripts being adopted but I thought it'd would give you the bigger picture.
Yañalif would be too confusing to implement now because it uses unsupported characters and a mix of Cyrillic ones with different pronunciation (f.ex. <ь> was /i/, <в> was /b/) which would trip up modern readers who are used to Cyrillic.
Arabic would never be supported by the government because it would stray from its West-oriented policy, plus it has religious associations too, so you have that baggage as well. It's still used by diaspora in China and Afghanistan. It honestly makes me sad because we miss out on possible communication with each other.
Runes are just a nationalist's pipe dream. They look cool and are the only “native” writing system you can think of, but there are too many problems with their implementation: they're not phonetic, make for poor fluid writing (they were meant to be carved, after all), they're isolating as we'd be the only ones using them, and so are harder to teach to people, unlike Latin with which everyone has some degree of familiarity and which is more practical in real life.
jacobvanloon
janainaart
titsay
izzy806
origamiaround
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
