[1] Nurmagambetov was born on 29 December 1927 in the settlement of Zhartogai, Torgai region, Zhangeldi District, in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic of the Russian SFSR (later Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic), now in Kostanay Region in Kazakhstan.

On April 17, 1946, at the age of 17, Nurmagambetov was arrested after citing a poem of Turgai-born Kazakh poet Akhmet Baitursynov (who was repressed and executed in 1937).

[2] The Kostanay court charged Nurmagambetov with the infamous Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code) (58-10) of Political repression in the Soviet Union era and he was sentenced to 7 years of prison spent in Karlag.

From 1961 to 1964, he finished graduate school of Linguistics Institute of Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences, Almaty, and then worked as a junior researcher.

On June 7, 1965 he received a PhD with the thesis Kazakh dialects in Turkmen SSR and on April 11, 1975 gave his doctoral dissertation Western dialectal group of Kazakh language.