The Sociolinguistic Attitudes of Kazakhs Towards the Latin Alphabet and Orthography Reform in Kazakh
Year: 2019
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The Sociolinguistic Attitudes of Kazakhs Towards the Latin Alphabet and Orthography Reform in Kazakh (Under the direction of David Mora-Marin) This research study examines the sociolinguistic attitudes of Kazakhs towards the Latin alphabet and orthography reform by means of the sociolinguistic attitude survey. The recent announcement of Nursultan Nazarbaev, the Kazakh president of the Republic of Kazakhstan, about an intention of the Kazakh government to have shifted the current Cyrillic-based Kazakh alphabet to the Latin seemed to lead to the division of the Kazakh society into two opposite groups. The president announced a full support of the Latin alphabet adoption by various sections of the population of Kazakhstan, although there is not or no publicly available a research study or official consensus regarding the reform in Kazakh. Therefore, this research study is directly motivated by this linguistic situation in Kazakhstan. To find out whether such an alphabet and orthography reform is triggered by a linguistic need of Kazakh, an interview with some Kazakh language experts was also conducted in addition to the sociolinguistic survey. As a result, both the Kazakh language users and experts unanimously support the current reform and associate it with a language need and globalization.
DOI: 10.17615/xsrq-1b76
Author: Kadirova, Raua-Banu
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2972042029