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Abstract

This article examines how debates on language reform in the early Kazakh press became a key site for articulating visions of Kazakh nationhood under late imperial conditions. Focusing on periodicals published between 1911 and 1917, particularly Qazaq, it argues that linguistic purism and deep anxiety over cultural survival were not opposing tendencies but mutually constitutive elements of an emerging national project. Assertions of the “purity” and distinctiveness of the Kazakh language did not reflect linguistic confidence; rather, they expressed an acute awareness of cultural endangerment and dependence within an imperial and transimperial cultural order. Language reform provided a framework through which Kazakh intellectuals translated diffuse fears about cultural extinction into a coherent vision of collective future. While Kazakh authors frequently criticised Tatar newspapers for alarmist narratives about linguistic decline, similar anxieties permeated Kazakh discussions themselves, revealing a shared condition of perceived vulnerability. In this context, purist language claims functioned as aspirational statements of cultural sovereignty, projecting an image of national integrity that did not yet exist institutionally. References to linguistic scholarship and expertise appeared in these debates but played a secondary, legitimising role. More significant was the way language reform came to define the contours of Kazakh nationhood: as a community bound by a shared language, educated through national schooling, sustained by its own literature, and mobilised around a national press. By tracing this transformation, the article reframes linguistic purism as a myth-making practice central to the formation of a Kazakh national project rather than a narrowly linguistic concern.