From law to label

Abstract

This article tests how Kazakhstan’s onomastic status-planning works in practice by asking: (RQ1) how coherent are the governing instruments — laws, decrees, registries, commissions — and how are responsibilities allocated; and (RQ2) how closely do public labels align with canonical forms. We code instrument coherence from legal texts and audit 17,846 deduplicated State Catalogue settlement entries against OpenStreetMap populated-place features. Results show that goals are specified, but procedures for interoperability and catalogue-platform synchronization are only partly operationalized. The broad linkage model yielded 6,439 linked OSM populated-place features against 17,846 deduplicated State Catalogue settlement entries. Among the 5,104 linked features carrying a Kazakh name:kk label, 2,899 (56.8%) matched the State Catalogue exactly. We propose low-cost operational measures — routine catalogue change records, character-encoding guidance, and regional monitoring — to raise alignment during Kazakhstan’s script transition. The design is replicable for other toponymic standardization regimes.