Paper long abstract:

In recent years, the economy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, as one of the former Soviet countries, has undergone considerable changes and development. Given the conditions inherent to globalization and free-market economy language skills at least in three languages is considered as a guarantee of economic competitiveness. Nowadays in connection with the current language policy and a political directive on trilingualism, three major languages, i.e., Kazakh, Russian and English, are mostly used in the context of Kazakhstani business communication. In accordance with official statistics the use of the state language (Kazakh) in the office-work of the state bodies has increased from 32.7 % (2006) to 96 % (2018), Russian is still very popular in private business institutions, whereas foreign companies use English and Russian in their communication. However, there is still a lack of information on the actual language use in the workplace of other organizations in Kazakhstan rather than state institutions. In this paper the survey questionnaire and a set of semi-structured interviews with Kazakhstani professionals from different types of business organizations (i.e., in the state, private sectors, national and international, etc.) were conducted to identify a real usage of Kazakh, Russian, and English in a variety of business settings, cross-cultural pragmatic failures, challenges and prospects associated with their usage. The tension between the necessity to find most progressive and optimal solutions to succeeding in contemporary global business community and the desire to maintain and develop the state language in Kazakhstani business context is of central importance in understanding current language policy in Kazakhstan. In addition, the analysis of Kazakhstani business correspondence written in three languages revealed cultural differences explained by the communicants' cognitive basis, the cultural tradition and behavioral tactics adopted in the communities. Mastering the basic components of the cognitive base of Kazakh, Russian and English cultural and linguistic communities may help to avoid many pragmatic failures in the course of intercultural business communication in Kazakhstan.