On April 17, 2024, under the organisation of the Department of Turkic Studies and Language Theory of the al-Farabi Kazakh National University, the 11th Republican «The Best Linguist» contest was held in an offline format among graduate students of higher educational institutions. «Best Linguist» is an educational competition that has been traditionally held for 11 years. The competition, which has been held for many years in the format of an intellectual competition among 3rd-year undergraduate students, this year was held for the first time in the format of an Olympiad among graduate students of philological specialities. Master’s students of al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Abay Kazakh National Pedagogical University and Kazakh National Women’s Teacher Training University took part in the Olympiad.

The main goal of the competition is to increase the scientific activity of graduate students, to expand the use of the Kazakh language in the field of science, and to contribute to the development of domestic linguistics.

The «The Best Linguist» Olympiad consisted of two stages. In the first stage, the participants passed a test on the topics of general linguistics, language theory, and history of linguistics.

In the second stage, graduate students defended their reports on the topic «Digital Linguistics in Kazakhstan» according to «home task». The participants talked about information and digital technologies in linguistics, automatic processing of text arrays, compilation of the corpus of the Kazakh language, machine translation, programs for automatic text analysis, adaptation, and transformation of texts to teach the language, high-level programming languages such as Python, Java, electronic resources for learning the Kazakh language. Reports prepared by the participants, and members of the jury — A. Employees of the Institute of Linguistics named after Baitursynuly D. Sadyk, A. N., a graduate of the Faculty of Philology, who completed an internship at the University of South Florida, USA, in TESOL with Seitbatkal and the international «Bolashak» program. Yesmanova was highly appreciated.

Linguistics is one of the universal sciences that relates to any field of science that has been developing since ancient times. Even today, linguistics studies are rapidly developing in various scientific areas. Since Kazakh linguistics as a part of world linguistics aims to develop following the trends in science, special attention is paid to the issue of digitalisation in linguistics. This year’s goal of the «Best Linguist» Olympiad was to contribute to developing digital linguistics in the country. Young scientists presented new ideas for developing domestic linguistics and increasing the scientific vitality of the Kazakh language.