KARAGANDA, Kazakhstan (AFP) — Hesitantly, with help from her teacher, Lyudmila Propishchan managed to string together a few basic phrases in Kazakh.

For this musician from Kazakhstan, an ex-Soviet Central Asian country where Russian is widely spoken, learning the local language is hard work, but she is keen to try.

"In Kazakhstan, not everyone is fluent in Kazakh. I started learning a month and a half ago and my aim is to be able to hold a conversation," said the 44-year-old violinist.

Like most other Central Asian languages, Kazakh is a Turkic language unrelated to Russian but written in the Cyrillic alphabet with some additional letters.

More than three decades after the end of the Soviet era, during which Russian became the lingua franca and the language of the elite, long-sidelined national languages are making a comeback in this region.