Later, growing fearful of pan-Turkic sentiment among Kazakhs, Uzbeks and other Turkic peoples in the Soviet Union, Moscow between 1938 and 1940 ordered that Kazakh and other Turkic languages be written in modified Cyrillic as part of a push to promote Russian culture. To try to ensure that different Turkic peoples could not read one another’s writings and develop a shared non-Soviet sense of common identity, it introduced nearly 20 versions of Cyrillic, Mr. Kocaoglu said.

After leading Kazakhstan to independence, Mr. Nazarbayev, concerned with a backlash from the country’s large ethnic Russian population, stalled on demands from nationalists for a swift revival of the Latin script. Other newly independent countries with similar Turkic languages like Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan all stopped using Cyrillic, but they had far smaller Russian populations.

“We all wanted to create our own states and our own cultures to help us escape from the collapsing Soviet Union,” said Anar Fazylzhanov, the deputy director of the Institute of Linguistics in Almaty, the country’s business and cultural capital. “But changing the alphabet was much more politically difficult in Kazakhstan.”

In the past two decades, however, the demographic balance has shifted in favor of ethnic Kazakhs, following the departure of many ethnic Russians, whose numbers fell from about 40 percent of the population at independence to about 20 percent today. This opened the way for Mr. Nazarbayev to endorse the axing of Cyrillic.

“Cyrillic was part of Russia’s colonial project and many see the Latin alphabet as an anti-imperial move,” said Dossym Satpayev, a prominent Kazakh political commentator.

The Russian Orthodox Church and Russian nationalists protested what they interpreted as a sellout to the West and an attack on Russian culture. Kazakhstan even had intelligence reports, according to experts familiar with the matter, that the Russian Parliament was preparing a statement praising Mr. Nazarbayev as a great statesman and pleading with him to preserve Cyrillic so as to cement his legacy as a leader who has kept the peace among different ethnic groups.

The move to the Latin alphabet accelerated in April with the establishment by Mr. Nazarbayev of a National Commission for the Modernization of Society, which included a panel of linguists entrusted with working out how Kazakh sounds should be transcribed.