The International Dimensions of Kazakhstan’s Alphabet Shift: A Study of Kazakh Multi-Vectorism in the 2010s

Abstract

The Kazakh language is currently undergoing a dramatic transformation after the 2017 announcement of a switch from Cyrillic to Latin characters. Furthermore, President Nursultan Nazarbayev effectively banned the Russian language from his cabinet in March 2018. Yet in Kazakhstan, only around 65% of the population speaks and understands Kazakh, while upwards of 90% use Russian as their primary language of communication, including the European Slavic population (Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians) which constitutes over one quarter of the whole. These moves could put the Russian-speaking population of Kazakhstan at a disadvantage. At a time when the Kremlin is become more assertive in its region and protective of ethnic Russians living abroad, this could have foreign political consequences for Astana. With this observation as its starting point, this thesis will explore the domestic and international dimensions of recent Kazakh language policy to come to an understanding as to why the policy was carried out. In doing so, it will also provide an up-to-date study of Kazakhstan’s multi-vector foreign policy. It will be shown that three factors provided the main impetus for the policy: economic modernisation, in which the English language plays an ever greater role; the need for a stronger sense of national identity, in which links to other Turkic-speaking countries have become more important; and a greater distancing from Moscow, which involves removing the last few links to the Soviet Union.