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Abstract

This paper critically explores the linguistic ideologies supporting codeswitching between the linguistic registers of Kazakh and Russian within Astana’s society. I conducted three months of ethnographic fieldwork to place life-story interviews in dialogue with observations of social interactions and of the linguistic landscape. I show that Russian is the main language used in public spaces, such as sales transactions, workspaces, and educational institutions. For this reason, Russian is an index of social prestige, echoing earlier soviet discourses that constructed Russian as the lingua franca. I divide my analysis of linguistic ideologies about the Kazakh language in Astana by looking into two registers. A majority of my interlocutors told me they mostly used Kazakh in contexts concerning tradition or family. A register that I describe as “domestic” emerged from this context and came to perform it. Consequently, it also serves as a marker of ethnic authenticity. However, the circulation of colonial and orientalist discourses through time and space stigmatized the Kazakh nacional’nost and contagiously stigmatized this register. The purist register that I describe as “institutional” is an explicit initiative from the Kazakhstani state to offer an alternative to this stigma and to bring Kazakh into the public space. To replace borrowing from Russian, this register includes a lot of neologisms, which can also be alienating for people who have been socialized in the “domestic” register. The “institutional” register is mostly disseminated by educational institutions. The same naturalization between language and nacional’nost leads to different expectations about linguistic abilities based on students’ physical appearance. For individuals who do not match those expectations, this linguistic ideology creates performance anxiety that counters the linguistic revitalization efforts and reinforces the use of Russian. Christiana (2023) argues for imagining de-ethnicisation as a mean to empower people to rethink categories that support biopower. In line with her argument, I aim to make visible the process of essentialization to support impulses for change in the shifting contemporary context.