Acceso usuarios
Ruth Bartholomä
Since gaining independence in 1991, the Republic of Kazakhstan has pursued a language policy promoting Kazakh as the “state language”, while at the same time strengthening Russian as the “language of interethnic communication”. With the presentation of the cultural project “Trinity of Languages” by the then President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2007, English also acquired a special status as an “international business language” to be learnt by the citizens of the state. Since then, the government pursued its language policy via three language programmes, outlined in policy documents that have also been subject of public debate. This paper examines these three documents as well as public reactions from the perspective of linguistic ideologies using qualitative linguistic discourse analysis that focuses on keywords, actors and intertextual references in the analysed documents. The aim is to trace which roles exactly are attributed to English and what constants and changes can be observed over the years. The analysis shows that the topic “business” is particularly active, and while English was still clearly defined as a foreign language in the first of these three language programmes, these references diminish in the following programmes. The findings indicate that the role of English as an important international language and language of business is widely recognised, but its roles and functions are defined differently from Kazakh and Russian.
