INTRODUCTION

In the Soviet era, Communist Party ideologists who tried to explain the USSR’s nationality policy faced the difficult task of reconciling two very different processes that were said to be taking place simultaneously. On the one hand, they had to adhere to the dogma that maintained that, thanks to the Party’s beneficent and scientifically based policy, cultures of all the USSR’s ethnic groups were enjoying an unprecedented “flourishing” (rastsvet).^[1] At the same time, however, they had to demonstrate that a “Soviet people” (sovetskii narod) had been created, that all ethnic groups in the USSR shared an increasingly common culture, and that eventually this would lead to a merging (sliianie) of cultures. Although the cultures of all ethnic groups were said to be benefiting from “mutual enrichment,” Party ideologists at least implied that the culture of the most numerous ethnic group comprising the Soviet people – the Russians – was the dominant element in the common culture, and that the mutual enrichment involved more “giving” by Russians and more “borrowing” by all others.
Using terms suggested by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, we can describe the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as undertaking a project to monopolize the processes of “categorization” and “identification.” That is, the regime sought to monopolize authority to categorize by creating a Soviet people, as well as its constituent ethnic groups. Furthermore, with no significant open political opposition, the regime was able to conduct identification, using its “material and symbolic resources to impose the classificatory schemes, and modes of social counting and accounting with which bureaucrats, judges, teachers, and doctors [had to] work and to which non-state actors [had to] refer.”^[2]
The USSR’s isolation, which enhanced the CPSU’s ability to carry out its identification program, was successful in creating what is frequently referred to in the literature as a common Soviet “sense of identity.” Brubaker and Cooper, who eschew the term “identity,” instead use “groupness” to describe individuals’ sense of “belonging to a single, distinctive solidarity group.” With regard to the entity called the Soviet people, the groupness created by the Party rested on shared common attributes (which Brubaker and Cooper refer to as “commonality”) and relational ties among individuals (which Brubaker and Cooper call “connectedness”). In the Soviet case, the commonality and the relational ties were rooted largely in Russian culture and language, and mediated by ethnic Russians.
Despite the level of success that the Communist Party achieved in creating groupness for the Soviet people, the USSR’s collapse destroyed the political underpinning of this experiment in nation building. However, because the demographic distribution of ethnic groups as defined by the Soviet regime did not correspond to the suddenly important political borders, the Soviet empire’s demise did not eliminate the issue of creating a sense of groupness for diverse groups. Instead, the problem shifted to the newly independent countries, which, like the Soviet regime before them, also faced the challenge of effacing other senses of groupness that might compete with a common identity for all inhabitants of the state.
Events since the Soviet Union’s collapse have demonstrated the contentious nature of determining the classificatory schemes to serve as the basis for the identification projects of the post-Soviet states. This has been the case not only in areas marked by armed conflict, such as Chechnya, Georgia, and Moldova, but also in areas where peace has prevailed. Among the territories in the latter category is Kazakhstan, whose territory, with the exception of the Russian Federation, dwarfs all other former Soviet republics.
This study will examine a critical arena of identification in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, namely, language status and use. For reasons explained below, I will focus on the prospects of the Kazakh language as it relates to commonality, connectedness, and groupness among the ethnic Kazakh population of Kazakhstan. Although the potential role of the Kazakh language to link Kazakhstan’s titular ethnic majority with the more than 40 percent minority population is worthy of study, this broader subject will largely remain in the background of the present investigation.
The relation between rastsvet and sliianie once described by Soviet ideologists seems to echo in the pronouncements of Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev on the subject of ethnic and supraethnic identification. In an address delivered on 31 August 2004, Nazarbayev proclaimed that a supraethnic community – one he referred to as the “Kazakhstani nation” (kazakhstanskaia natsiia /qazaq ulty) – is in the process of emerging. The president described this as a “free association of ethnic groups [etnosy], [i.e.,] their cultural-political and social-economic unity.” In the very same sentence about unity, however, Nazarbayev also emphasized the ethnic diversity (etnicheskoe mnogoobrazie) of his country’s population. Whereas the president’s reference to “cultural-political and social-economic unity” was reminiscent of sliianie, his stress on diversity seemed to be a post-Soviet version of rastsvet.^[3]
Nazarbayev’s reference to a Kazakhstani nation produced a very strong reaction among members of Kazakhstan’s intelligentsia. The response from non-Kazakhs – despite the president’s assurances about diversity – may be rooted in a perception that “Kazakhstani-ness” is a step toward eventual assimilation into a nation dominated by a Kazakh majority. The president’s introduction of the term “Kazakhstani nation,” however, also evoked a very negative reaction from some Kazakh nationalists, i.e., those who see Kazakhstan above all as the homeland of the Kazakhs, and who insist that Kazakhstan must make Kazakh culture the “first among equals.” In the nationalist view, ethnic minorities of Kazakhstan – including Russians – reside in the country as guests, and, therefore, should live according to the rules of their (Kazakh) hosts.^[4]
A striking example of opposition to Nazarbayev’s idea of a Kazakhstani nation from a Kazakh nationalist appeared in an article published in the newspaper Turkistan just a few weeks after the president’s speech. This article consists of a full-page interview with writer Beybit Qoyshybayev.^[5] Perhaps above all the interview is remarkable because in it Qoyshybayev draws a direct parallel between the supraethnic consolidation policies of the USSR (where Russian culture formed the core) and Kazakhstan (where the author maintains Kazakhs should form the core). Qoyshybayev makes it clear that he is not opposed in principle to the assimilation of minorities within Kazakhstan. That is, he is not against the idea of a policy or a program of identification that would encourage greater commonality and connectedness among all citizens of the country. His objection to the concept of a Kazakhstani nation is based in his perception that the Kazakhs themselves are presently too weak to attempt to create a Kazakhstani nation with a Kazakh core.^[6] If they were not so weak, Qoyshybayev maintains, Kazakhs “would not fear” the president’s proposal. “However, unfortunately, the situation is different. It is hard to say that [today] Kazakhs are a nation [ult] with a firm foundation. The reason is that there has been a policy of Russifying us since tsarist times.”
Qoyshybayev places a special emphasis on language, which he identifies as a Soviet-era tool of assimilation that can serve to promote consolidation in a new form today. The author recalls that in Soviet times, the CPSU promoted Russian as a “second mother tongue” for minorities, and maintained that only one language would remain by the time world civilization reached communism. In terms of language and consolidation, Qoyshybayev expresses fear that if a Kazakhstani nation is promoted at present, then Russian, not Kazakh, will provide the linguistic bond. This is because in addition to the non-Kazakhs, who comprise 40 percent of Kazakhstan’s population today (almost all of whom know Russian but very few of whom know Kazakh), among the titular nationality, too, a large share are literate in Russian, but cannot read or write “their own” language.
For this reason, in Qoyshybayev’s view, the linguistic consolidation that should be promoted today is one primarily involving Kazakhs, and not the country’s ethnic minorities; for Qoyshybayev, linguistic consolidation of any sort of Kazakhstani nation around a Kazakh language core belongs to a distant future. In terms of Brubaker and Cooper’s analytic scheme, Qoyshybayev seems to be saying that Kazakhstani commonality and connectedness is currently so closely bound to the Russian language that a premature policy promoting Kazakhstani (as opposed to Kazakh) identification will advance the Russian language and thus promote groupness rooted in it.
The tension between the ethnic and supraethnic consolidation in Kazakhstan has been noted, among others, by Norwegian scholar Jшrn Holm-Hansen. In Holm-Hansen’s view, “Kazakhstani nation-builders are attempting to achieve several incompatible goals at the same time. They are trying simultaneously to ethnify the state and to integrate the population on a supraethnic basis.” The unworkable nature of the exercise is all the greater, according to Holm-Hansen, because it “presuppose[s] clear ethnic identities in the population, whereas such clarity is far from evident in all cases.”^[7]
Although Holm-Hansen does not use the terminology of Brubaker and Cooper, he seems to be referring both to contradictory classificatory schemes of identification as well as to ambiguous senses of groupness. The contradictions and ambiguity referred to by Holm-Hansen are true not only in the case of Kazakhstan’s minorities, but also (and perhaps especially) in the case of Kazakhs. In large part, this is due to the high degree of Russification of Kazakh culture during the tsarist and Soviet eras, which meant that upon Kazakhstan’s independence, a large share of the ethnic Kazakh population, especially among the more educated urban members, felt more at home in a Russian than Kazakh cultural setting. As a result, many of them shared more bonds and felt a greater sense of groupness with non-Kazakhs (especially Russians) than with the majority of their co-ethnics. For this reason, a longstanding question in defining the content of Kazakh culture has revolved around the problem of determining the degree of similarity and difference between Kazakh and Russian, and, by implication, the extent to which certain borrowed elements of Russian culture have become integral parts of Kazakh culture that should be embraced, or, alternatively, classified as alien and therefore purged.
This problem applies especially in the field of language. Although at the end of the Soviet era, Kazakh was still the dominant language in rural areas of the republic, Russian had replaced it among a large share of urban ethnic Kazakhs. I will argue below that despite a number of factors that continue to work against the rapid recovery of the status of Kazakh today, Kazakh’s domains of use are likely to expand over the coming decades. As this happens, the Kazakh language is likely to become a more important component of Kazakh commonality as well as groupness.
As noted above, this study will focus on ethnic Kazakhs, and therefore will deal only indirectly with the possibility of the Kazakh language becoming part of a Kazakhstani connectedness or groupness. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, reflecting statements by President Nazarbayev, Article 4 of the Kazakhstan language law states that mastering the Kazakh language is “the obligation” of all of Kazakhstan’s citizens – not just ethnic Kazakhs.^[8] Indeed, in line with the idea of the Kazakh language as a bond that is to link all citizens of his country, the president recently referred to the language as “one of the main factors of the unity (edinenie) of all citizens of Kazakhstan” (kazakhstantsy).^[9]
In the next two sections of this article, I will provide background about several factors that help explain the relation of Kazakh language to commonality, connectedness, and groupness in Kazakhstan since independence. First, I will examine some of the most important legacies of the Soviet era, including the link between language, ethnic group, and territory in official Soviet ideology and in popular belief, as well as some major points that shaped language planning in Kazakhstan. These issues are important because the mindsets of both leaders and masses in Kazakhstan and other post-Soviet states were profoundly affected by categories and relations defined by the CPSU, and by language planning efforts of the Soviet era. I will then provide background on Kazakhstan’s demographic situation on the eve of independence. This warrants particular attention because so few non-Kazakhs knew (or even today know) Kazakh, and because Kazakhs’ knowledge of Kazakh was closely correlated to place of residence. Following a discussion of these topics, I will present a very brief overview of changes in several aspects of Kazakh language status from the late Soviet period until the present.^[10] This analysis will provide a basis for considering the most important political, economic, and demographic factors in Kazakhstan affecting language status change today, especially among Kazakhs, and the likely direction of future change.

SOVIET LEGACY IN IDEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE PLANNING

Despite the USSR’s collapse, the CPSU’s ideological canon about nations and their link to territory and language continues to shape both official government policy and popular beliefs in Kazakhstan. According to this canon – derived from Joseph Stalin’s “Theses on the National Question” (originally published in 1913) – each nation is a historically developed community of people united by a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up as manifest in a community of culture.^[11]
In today’s independent Kazakhstan, official accounts trace a centuries-old history of Kazakh gosudarstvennost’ (“statehood” or “state system”). Even if we accept this at face value, it remains true that Soviet identification policies played a critical role in linking a clearly defined piece of territory to a Kazakh nation said to have the unique attributes of a nation named by Stalin. The Soviet project of identification and nation building in Central Asia, along with dividing up territory, also parceled out much of what had been a common patrimony to distinct Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, and Karakalpak nations, each with its own national history, national culture, and national language.
For the purposes of this article, one of the most important elements of the Soviet legacy is the widespread belief among Kazakhs that they and their culture, including their language, bear a natural link to their particular territory, which today extends as far as Kazakhstan’s borders.^[12] A corollary of this view is a belief that, in independent Kazakhstan, members of the titular nationality have a right or even obligation to promote their language as an element of groupness, especially among their co-ethnics.
Both in Soviet-era ideological writings and in today’s official pronouncements in Kazakhstan, language is said to be a link among the population in the entire state as well as within individual ethnic groups. In the Soviet era, in accordance with Stalin’s definition, every nationality had its own language. At the same time, however, Russian – termed the “second mother tongue” of the USSR’s non-Russian nationalities – was said to fulfill special functions within the boundaries of the USSR. The president of today’s independent Kazakhstan, despite his references to the Kazakh language as a key factor in the unity of all citizens of Kazakhstan, and his references to a single Kazakhstani nation (not just a “people”), nevertheless goes out of his way to underline major roles for other native languages spoken in the country.^[13] Such Kazakh nationalists as Qoyshybayev also recall Soviet precedents. Their emphasis is more one-sided than that of their president, and they call for Kazakh to be elevated to a position in independent Kazakhstan that is no less prestigious or important than Russian’s in the USSR.
Before proceeding, it is worth a brief look at some issues concerning Kazakh language and Soviet language planning and policy for Kazakh. One of the distinguishing points about Kazakh – especially in contrast to, say, the spoken varieties that were united to create a standard literary form of Uzbek or Tajik – is that in the early twentieth century only relatively minor differences separated dialects spoken over a vast territory.^[14] It should also be noted that although literacy was very low among Kazakhs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of writing systems had been used for Kazakh in recent memory, and at the time, prominent Kazakh periodicals in a modified version of the Arabic script were being published.^[15]
In the late 1920s, Soviet policy dictated that Kazakh writing, along with that of other Turkic languages of the USSR, shift from Arabic to Latin letters. This was the first of two fundamental breaks that affected Kazakh; the second, a decade after Latinization, was the shift to modified versions of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. These changes represented major Soviet policies concerning the categorization and identification of “Kazakh-ness.” Whether intended or not, the shift to Latin letters fostered a commonality between Turkic speakers in the USSR and populations literate in other languages, including Turkish, as well as French, German, and English. In sharp contrast, the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet reflected the CPSU’s attempt to link Kazakhs above all to Russians.
While Russification was the dominant thrust of Soviet linguistic policy for roughly half a century, it is important to note that in the era that preceded Russification – i.e., during korenizatsiia (“rooting” or “indigenization”) of the 1920s and early 1930s – the Soviet regime followed a kind of affirmative action policy. During korenizatsiia, the CPSU actively promoted non-Russian cadres and encouraged the use of non-Russian languages in such critical areas as administration and education. This went hand in hand with efforts to raise literacy throughout the Soviet Union, and to encourage local Russian and other administrators working among non-Russians to learn minority languages.^[16]
The decline of korenizatsiia after about 1933 greatly reduced the attention to non-Russian languages in administration, education, and other areas. The change in the relative status of Russian and other languages in the USSR during the 1930s is also evident in the 1938 CPSU decree making Russian an obligatory subject in all the USSR’s non-Russian schools.^[17] Critical to the analysis here, though, is that, despite these trends, Kazakh and other non-Russian titular languages of the union republics continued to be widely used in primary and secondary education for the rest of the Soviet era.^[18] This was especially true in rural areas. In the case of Central Asia, this is where the majority of indigenous groups lived. I will discuss below the severity of Kazakh’s decline in urban schools. For now, though, it must be emphasized that even in the mid-1980s, probably over 80 percent of Kazakh children in Kazakhstan’s rural areas attended Kazakh-medium classes.^[19]
In considering the relevance of Soviet policies for the prospects of Kazakh language in the post-Soviet era, it is also critical to note the considerable Kazakh language corpus development during the half-century following the demise of korenizatsiia. In addition to considerable scholarship devoted to various aspects of the Kazakh language,^[20] important Soviet-era achievements in corpus development included the publication of major reference books in Kazakh (e.g., the twelve-volume Kazakh-language encyclopedia, published between 1972 and 1978, and a ten-volume dictionary of the Kazakh language, published between 1974 and 1986).^[21]

DEMOGRAPHIC BACKGROUND

The demographic composition of the population living on the territory of today’s Kazakhstan has changed radically since the end of the nineteenth century. According to the census of 1897 (by which time many Russians had migrated to the Kazakh steppe), Kazakhs still comprised 81.8 percent of the total population of 4.1 million. Russians accounted for 11 percent of the inhabitants, and other ethnic groups just 7.2 percent. Continued massive immigration of settlers raised the Russian share to 29.6 percent by 1917, by which time Kazakhs had fallen to 58.5 percent (and “others” had increased to about 12 percent).^[22] A key event that shaped Kazakhstan’s demography in the twentieth century was the collectivization of agriculture, which in the case of Kazakhstan also meant massive forced sedentarization. In the period from 1929 to 1936 alone, famine and other causes reduced the number of Kazakh households from 1,233,000 to 565,000. The major cause of the famine was the precipitous drop (almost 80 percent) in the number of livestock in Kazakhstan. This was especially serious inasmuch as animal husbandry was the core of the Kazakhs’ livelihood and source of food. Out-migration from Kazakhstan, some of it to China, also contributed to population loss.^[23]
Over the years of Soviet power, the ethnic composition of Kazakhstan’s population also changed due to a number of other Communist Party policies, many of which brought large numbers of non-Kazakhs into the republic. Most important among these were the deportation of “punished peoples” to Kazakhstan in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the use of Kazakhstan as a site for prison labor camps, the Virgin Lands program of the late 1950s, and a longstanding policy of All-Union ministries’ dispatching workers from other regions of the USSR to Kazakhstan.^[24] By around 1960, the Kazakh share of the republic’s population reached its nadir, about 30 percent. By this time the Russian share had grown to almost 43 percent, and the total Slavic share (including Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles) was around 52 percent. In addition, the German population, mostly deported to the region during World War II, had grown to 7 percent.^[25]
Primarily due to their relatively high birthrate, by the time of the last Soviet census (1989) the percentage of Kazakhs had substantially recovered, to around 40 percent; by this time, the Russian share (over 37 percent) had fallen to less than the Kazakh, and other ethnic groups – including about 7 percent non-Russian Slavs (mostly Ukrainians) and almost 6 percent Germans – accounted for the remaining approximately 22 percent.^[26] No other individual ethnic group accounted for more than about 2 percent of the total.
One of the most important facts about Kazakhstan’s demography at the end of the Soviet era is that while Kazakhs accounted for over 57 percent of the republic’s total rural inhabitants, in urban locales they barely exceeded 27 percent. Taking the republic’s urban areas as a whole, Russians (almost 51 percent) outnumbered Kazakhs by a ratio of almost 2:1. On the other hand, in rural areas, the Kazakh share of about 57 percent meant that they outnumbered Russians (under 20 percent) by almost 3:1. The combined Ukrainian and German share of the urban population was about 11 percent, with the remaining approximately 11 percent split among many other ethnic groups.

TABLE 1. KAZAKHSTAN POPULATION 1989

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/fierman.jpg>

Source: Agenstvo Respubliki Kazakhstan po statistike. Natsional’nyi sostav naseleniia Respubliki Kazakhstan. Tom. 1: Natsional’nyi sostav naseleniia Respubliki Kazakhstan. Almaty, 2000. Pp. 6-14.

In terms of geographical distribution in various regions of Kazakhstan, at the end of the Soviet era Kazakhs already outnumbered other groups in the west and (especially) certain southern regions. However, according to the 1989 census, they comprised less than 20 percent of the population in two of Kazakhstan’s seventeen oblasts (Qaraghandy and North Kazakhstan), and between 20 and 25 percent in five others (Pavlodar, East Kazakhstan, Kokshetau, Qostanay, and Alma-Ata city). In all of these cases, the large majority of the non-Kazakh population was Slavic; with the exception of Alma-Ata (then the capital city), all of these oblasts are located in Kazakhstan’s north, east, and central regions.^[27] Not surprisingly, given this fact, Kazakhs were a small minority in the larger cities of the “Slavic” oblasts. In the capitals of five of these oblasts (i.e., oblast centers), Kazakhs accounted for under 15 percent of the population.^[28]

CHANGE IN KAZAKH LANGUAGE’S URBAN STRENGTH IN RECENT DECADES

Although the Soviet 1989 census purports that well over 98 percent of Kazakhs in Kazakhstan (including 97 percent in urban areas) were “mother tongue” Kazakh speakers, these data give a very unrealistic picture of how many were actually fluent in the language.^[29] The prominent Kazakh scholar S. Z. Zimanov, writing at about the time of the census, estimated that about 40 percent of Kazakhs “either [did] not know their mother tongue or [knew] it poorly.”^[30] Whatever the exact figure, by the middle of the 1980s, Kazakh had clearly lost a great deal of ground to Russian in urban areas. Although Russian’s status in rural areas had also risen and a large share of rural Kazakhs knew Russian, they were also fluent – and usually educated – in Kazakh.^[31] Thus, the need for raising the level of Kazakh skills was, above all, an urban problem.
By the mid-1980s, many middle and younger generation Kazakhs in Kazakhstan’s cities saw little reason to preserve Kazakh, even in the home.^[32] Since then, there has been a considerable change: many Kazakhs interviewed in the last five years during travel to Kazakhstan cities, including individuals born in the late 1970s or early 1980s to parents who grew up viewing Kazakh as something of minimal importance for their future, now see considerable benefits to knowing Kazakh. This is true both for instrumental reasons (e.g., calculating that Kazakh skills may improve employment prospects) as well as affective ones. The latter, which are closely related to groupness, appear to reflect a greater – though far from universal – desire today among Kazakhs to connect with their ancestors and co-ethnics through a shared linguistic bond.
In terms of the instrumental reasons, much of the change reflects language laws and programs that have been adopted in Kazakhstan since 1989. We will examine here some fragmentary evidence of change as related to three areas – education, electronic mass media, and the workplace.^[33]

Education. In the late Soviet period, a large share of Kazakh urban children were being educated in Russian-medium classes. Most cities had few if any Kazakh-medium schools. In the case of Alma-Ata, the then capital city with a population of hundreds of thousands of Kazakhs, only two schools provided Kazakh-medium instruction.^[34]
Although no precise data are available for the mid- to late-1980s on the proportion of Kazakh pupils in Russian-medium classes, almost certainly the share was substantially more than half: in the 1990-1991 school year (by which time there had been something of a boom in Kazakh-medium education),^[35] about 49 percent of Kazakh urban pupils were in Russian-medium classes. The picture today is very different: the share of Kazakh urban pupils in Russian-medium classes has declined to somewhere in the range of 25 to 30 percent.^[36]
The trend in higher education has been much the same. In the 1989-1990 academic year, only 17.9 percent of all students enrolled in Kazakhstan’s higher educational institutions studied in Kazakh-language groups.^[37] In the 2002-2003, 2003-2004, and 2004-2005 academic years, the analogous share ranged between 32 percent and 40 percent.^[38] Given that these figures represent students of all nationalities, for all years cited the share of ethnic Kazakh students studying in the Kazakh language is, of course, much higher. Thus, even in 1989-1990 (when the share for students of all nationalities was 17.9 percent), the share for ethnic Kazakhs was 32.7 percent.^[39]

Mass media. Unlike Kazakh-medium schools, Kazakh electronic mass media were widely available in urban areas. Still, at least in the case of radio, the situation of Kazakh relative to Russian deteriorated at the end of the Soviet era. Kazakh Radio (i.e., the main radio station for Kazakhstan, not just in the Kazakh language) generally transmitted its main program daily from 6:00 a.m. until midnight. Up until the early 1960s, the Kazakh-language share comprised half or even more of total transmissions; however, it was subsequently reduced to only about one third. This was compensated somewhat by twelve hours of Kazakh-language broadcasts of Kazakh Radio’s Shalqar editorial office. The subject mix treated in Kazakh Radio’s Kazakh-language broadcasts probably contributed to a low level of interest among urban listeners: the editorial office of Kazakh Radio in charge of programming specifically for agricultural workers, for example, produced shows with three hours of material daily. This would account for half of all Kazakh broadcasts. The agricultural broadcasts in Russian, only two hours, seem to have constituted a much smaller share of all broadcasts in that language, perhaps only about 15 percent.^[40] Naturally, in addition to radio broadcasts originating in Kazakhstan, listeners could tune in to a much richer variety of programming from Moscow.
The quality of Kazakh-language television was reportedly much lower than radio, and seems to have averaged about three hours out of the total eight hours of broadcasts per day. As in the case of radio, the share of Kazakh-language transmissions in republic TV also markedly declined during the 1970s. Likewise, programming from Moscow was much more varied than that produced locally.^[41]
Today a law requires all electronic media channels and stations to broadcast at least half of their transmissions in Kazakh. Although this is not universally observed, and many broadcasters have ignored the spirit of the law by scheduling Kazakh-language programs at night, Kazakh television and radio audiences have a much wider choice today. Television programs include game shows, talk shows devoted to controversial topics, and music clips reminiscent of those on American MTV. The mere presence of these programs, of course, does not mean that a particular share of the potential audience is viewing or listening to them. Indeed, as in the Soviet era, many programs from Moscow continue to enjoy great popularity among audiences. In addition, many cable channels are also available. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence suggests that a substantial share of the Kazakh audience, including the urban audience, tunes in to Kazakh-language electronic media.^[42]

Workplace. Russian was the overwhelming language of communication in the urban workplace of the 1970s and 1980s. Above all, this was because in the ethnically integrated urban work environment, very few non-Kazakhs, who constituted the large majority, knew Kazakh, whereas most urban Kazakhs were fluent or had at least some skills in Russian.^[43] Even today, in most cities Russian is still used more than Kazakh. However, provisions of the language legislation have helped Kazakh make substantial inroads. This is especially true in the case of government offices. In late 2001 or early 2002, Qyzylorda Oblast (where Kazakhs comprise about 95 percent of the population) became the first oblast officially to shift all office work (deloproizvodstvo) to Kazakh. Although some communications, in particular a large share of those with the government in the capital, apparently continue in Russian, the change to date still represents an important rise in status for Kazakh. Four other oblasts have since officially followed Qyzylorda’s lead, and plans call for all government internal office work throughout the country to be shifted to Kazakh by 2008.^[44] Despite the evidence of continued use of Russian even in oblasts where there has supposedly been a total shift to the state language, it is clear that Kazakh is used much more in government offices today than fifteen years ago, let alone in the Brezhnev era of the 1970s and early 1980s.^[45]
The status and domains of use of Kazakh and Russian in the mass media, education, and the workplace at the end of the Soviet era were contributing to a commonality between most urban Kazakhs and tens of millions of other Soviet citizens for whom Russian was the dominant language. These same phenomena were increasingly breaking the commonality between urban Kazakhs and their rural Kazakh-dominant cousins. This configuration of commonality was also affecting groupness, as urban Kazakhs increasingly realized that they had more in common with Russians throughout the USSR than with Kazakhs in the villages. Changes in the mass media, education, and workplace since independence have probably not fundamentally changed the cleavages that underlie groupness in Kazakhstan. However, thanks in part to the greater prevalence of the Kazakh language in various domains since independence, the language appears to have begun to serve as part of a commonality for an increasing share of Kazakhs.