Beyond Colonial Residues: Russian as Cultural Capital in Kazakh-Medium Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Multilingualism and Education in "Post-Soviet", Post-Colonial Spaces

Proposal

Russian language remains widely understood across Central Asia as a legacy of Soviet imperial control, once deployed to cultivate a unified Soviet identity. While this historical framing persists, recent geopolitical events- such as Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine- have reinforced global and regional narratives linking Russian language use to ethnic identity or political loyalty. Such framings, often amplified by political and media discourse, obscure the multilingual realities of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, where Russian is embedded in and permeates everyday life irrespective of political stance. This paper draws on a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews with five Russian-dominant ethnic Kazakh students in a rural Kazakh-medium school, where Kazakh is institutionally privileged. Using Bourdieu’s (1986, 1991) theory of practice, particularly the concept of capital, the analysis reconceptualises Russian not as a static colonial residue but as a dynamic, socially constructed resource within the educational field. In Kazakhstan, this theoretical lens is rarely applied to youth multilingualism, offering new insight into how colonial languages are locally re-appropriated. Findings reveal a disjuncture between postcolonial discourse and lived multilingualism: Russian is mobilised for peer solidarity, academic purposes, and pragmatic linguistic capital, rather than signalling ideological affiliation. In this setting, Russian operates as a form of cultural and social capital whose value is continually renegotiated through local histories and social relationships. By foregrounding youth perspectives in a rarely studied rural context, the study contributes to decolonial sociolinguistics by showing that addressing the presence of the colonial language need not entail erasure, but can involve recognition of multilingual repertoires as spaces of agency, adaptation, and re-appropriation.(

Authors

• Assel Shakuliyeva, Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education

• Sulushash I. Kerimkulova, Nazarbayev University