Kazakhstan, with a population of about 16.5 million, presents a fascinating and complex case of multilingualism with significant implications for education. There is a reasonable amount of ethnolinguistic diversity, including more than 70 languages, in Kazakhstan, though only two of these languages (Kazakh and Russian) have more than 500,000 speakers.  During the tsarist and Soviet periods, Russian played a central role in virtually all domains of life in Kazakhstan.  Today, although Kazakh is constitutionally identified as the official language of the country, and while strong efforts are being made to promote its use, Russian continues to function throughout the society as the common interlanguage and is also recognized in the Constitution, where it notes that “in state institutions and local self-administrative bodies [Russian] shall be used on equal grounds along with the Kazakh language” (Article 7: 1).

The role of Russian in Kazakhstan is almost unique in post-Soviet countries other than Russia itself, especially with respect to the degree to which non-ethnic Russians are both willing and able to utilize it. This is due to two major factors.  The first is the degree of Russification that has taken place over the past two centuries.  There was a significant amount of language shift from Kazakh to Russian, especially during the Soviet era, when speaking Russian was a status marker and a condition for the opening of many professional and academic doors.  Even today many ethnically Kazakh individuals do not speak Kazakh, or do not speak it well.  The second factor is the linguistic demography of the country. Although native speakers of Kazakh outnumber native speakers of Russian by a margin of roughly 5:2, there are nearly 12 million second language speakers of Russian in Kazakhstan while there are only about 770,000 second language speakers of Kazakh.

With independence in 1991, Kazakhstan emerged with an ethnically divided population, as did most post-Soviet states.  Immigration into Kazakhstan (sometimes voluntary, more often forced) had taken place from the 1930s (when Kazakhstan was a major center for ГУЛагs, or forced labor camps) through the ‘Virgin Lands Campaign’ (Освое́ние целины́) during the Khrushchev era. The immigrants to Kazakhstan included people from a wide range of ethnolinguistic groups, but the vast majority were Russian and Russian-speaking. By 1989, Russians constituted almost 40% of the total population of the country.  Several groups – most notably the Volga Germans and Russians – began emigrating in the 1970s, a trend which increased with the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to the 2009 census, 63% are Kazakh and 24% are Russian.

The Ministry of Education and Science is implementing a multilingual language-in-education model, in which English will be added to the current bilingual (Kazakh and Russian) curriculum.  Toward this end, a network of specialized schools for gifted children focusing on multilingual education has been created (SPED, 2010: 8), and since 2010 “training of pedagogical staff with polylingual education in the country’s higher educational institutions [is being] carried out through the increase in loans for foreign language teaching in the range of basic subjects. For this purpose the standard curriculum will be updated in the part concerning training of pedagogical staff in trilingual teaching” (SPED, 2010: 27).

One key variable in the process of on-going language planning in Kazakhstan is the attitude of the population toward the major languages of the country, as well as toward the move toward multilingual education. In this study, we are exploring the attitudes and beliefs of an important minority group in Kazakhstan.

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