Language Policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan as a Mechanism for the Construction of a New National Identity | South-Russian Journal of Social Sciences
Language Policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan as a Mechanism for the Construction of a New National Identity
Vol. 23 (2022) No. 2, Identity Politics
Vol. 23 (2022) No. 2
Identity Politics

Language Policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan as a Mechanism for the Construction of a New National Identity

Chernichkin D.A.
Institute for Research on the Problems of the South of Russia and the Caspian Sea, Tatishchev State University
ORCID ID 0000-0002-9647-7916
PDF (Russian)
https://doi.org/10.31429/26190567-23-2-106-128
https://doi.org/10.31429/26190567-23-2-106-128

How to Cite Array

Chernichkin D.A. (2022) Language Policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan as a Mechanism for the Construction of a New National Identity. South-Russian Journal of Social Sciences, 23 (2), pp. 106-128. DOI: 10.31429/26190567-23-2-106-128 (In Russian)
Submission Date 2022-05-21
Accepted Date 2022-06-22
Published Date 2022-08-30

Copyright (c) 2022 Дмитрий Алексеевич Черничкин

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The article contains the analysis of the current linguistic situation in Kazakhstan, which provides forecasts and outlines prospects for the language policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The documents on language policy of Kazakhstan are analyzed, and such notable phenomena in the implementation of language policy as Kazakhization, the Romanization of the Kazakh written language, and the trilingual policy are considered. The language policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, beginning with the declaration of independence, has had and has a direct connection with the policy of national identity at large and the project of building a Kazakhstani political nation, in particular. The specifics of Kazakh bilingualism (and since 2007 officially declared trilingualism) consists, in the opinion of the author, in that the strengthening of Kazakhstanis’ ethnic identity of the postulated civil nation is based on the priority of the Kazakh language as both the only official state language and the language of the titular. Meanwhile, it is considered important to preserve and promote the development of Russian as an official language. Nevertheless, some tension between these two objectives, and recent drastic transformations, such as the reform of the written Kazakh language or the promotion of the language patrols, provide a ground for certain ambivalence in terms of assessing the stability of this kind of linguistic identity policy, which is bound to prompt a very critical evaluation as to its consistency.

Keywords

language, language policy, Kazakhstan, Russia, bilingualism, trilinguism, romanization, language patrols

Acknowledgements

The study was carried out by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation No. 22-18-00301 “The process of constructing new identities in the Caspian macroregion in the context of societal security”.

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