It is difficult to acquire reliable current data about mother tongues spoken in Kazakhstan. Even if the government statistics had remained available without charge, they are untrustworthy--strongly biased into minimizing the proportion of ethnic Kazakhs who speak only, or primarily, Russian. And older information cannot account for Russian out-migration, possible internal migration associated with the move of the republic's capital, and the possible trend of bilingual, primarily Russian-speaking, ethnic Kazakhs to not teach Russian to their children--something encouraged by government persecution of Russian-speaking ethnic Kazakhs.