A Linguistic Ethnographic Perspective on Kazakhstan's Trinity of Languages
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A LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE ON KAZAKHSTAN’S TRINITY OF LANGUAGES: LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES AND IDENTITIES IN A MULTILINGUAL UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY by LOUISE WHEELER A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY School of Education College of Social Sciences University of Birmingham June 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT A Linguistic Ethnographic Perspective on Kazakhstan’s Trinity of Languages: Language ideologies and identities in a multilingual university community This thesis presents a linguistic ethnographic study of language ideologies and identities in a multilingual, university community in Kazakhstan: a university aspiring to put Kazakhstan’s ‘Trinity of Languages’ project, aimed at developing societal tri-lingualism in Kazakh, Russian and English, into practice. Data was collected at a Kazakhstani university from 2012 to 2013, combining participant-observation and fieldnotes, audio recordings and interviews. Drawing on the concept of heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981), the research investigates how young people draw on ideologies of separate and flexible multilingualism (Blackledge and Creese 2010) and on the often contested indexicalities of Kazakh, Russian and English linguistic resources to negotiate identities as multilingual people in Kazakhstan, particularly in contexts of performance, and stance-taking. Consideration of these ideological and linguistic resources also sheds light on Kazakhstan’s wider ‘processes of ideological transformation’ (Smagulova 2008:195) and their real-life implications for multilingual people. Furthermore, the analysis highlights how participants construct stances towards translanguaging (Garcia 2009) and suggests that acts of contextualisation, which frame interactions as being more or less ‘on-stage’ or ‘off-stage’, shape the way that speakers draw on linguistic resources and their indexical meanings, and how these contexts can afford or constrain speaker agency in the negotiation of identities. AKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to aknowledge the following people for their invaluable support and encourangement, without whom my research and this thesis would not have been possible. Firstly, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all my participants - students, teachers, admistrators, researchers and translators - in Kazakhstan. Your contributions, insights and enthusiasm have been critical to this research. Thank you for sharing your languages, your experiences and your hospitality and for making sure that Almaty and Kazakhstan will always have a special place in my heart. Көп рақмет. Большое спасибо. I would also like to thank my joint supervisors, Professor Angela Creese and Professor Adrian Blackledge, for their encouragement, patience, wisdom and guidance throughout my doctoral study. I am immensely grateful for the time, knowledge, understanding and passion for research that they have shared with me over my PhD study. I am also grateful to The University of Birmingham, School of Education, for their financial, academic and adminstative support, and to all those involved in the British Council Aspire Project, which made my research in Kazakhstan possible. Last, but by absolutely no means least, I would like to thank my family, friends and especially my husband Rey. Your kindness, support and belief in me has been invaluable. I wish I had the words to express the depth of my gratitude, but know that every word of this thesis was made possible by you. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Aims and nature of the study ....................................................................................... 2 1.3 Researcher Background and Motivations: Why Kazakhstan? Why Multilingualism? Why me? ................................................................................................................................. 3 1.4 Researching Multilingualism in Kazakhstan ............................................................... 5 1.5 Structure of the Thesis ................................................................................................. 7 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................... 10 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 10 2.2 A Heteroglossic Conceptual Framework ................................................................... 11 2.2.1 Language and Multilingualism as Heteroglossia ............................................... 11 2.2.2 Translanguaging ................................................................................................. 14 2.2.3 Agency ................................................................................................................ 17 2.2.4 Language ideologies ........................................................................................... 20 2.2.5 Language and Identity ........................................................................................ 24 2.2.6 Indexicality ......................................................................................................... 28 2.3 Multilingualism, Language Ideologies and Identities in Kazakhstan ........................ 32 2.3.1 Kazakhstan’s Multilingualism and the Trinity of Languages ............................ 32 2.3.2 Language ideology transformation Kazakhstan ................................................. 34 2.3.3 Kazakh and Kazakhstani: Language Ideologies and Identities .......................... 35 2.3.4 The Legacy of Soviet Era Ideologies on Language and Identity ....................... 37 2.3.5 Ideologies and Identities of Kazakhstan’s ‘Languages’ ..................................... 38 2.3.6 Threat, Endangerment and Purity ....................................................................... 41 2.3.7 English in Kazakhstan: New Opportunities, New Threats ................................. 43 2.4 Performance and Stance as Analytical Lenses .......................................................... 45 2.4.1 Performance ........................................................................................................ 46 2.4.2 The Role of Audiences ....................................................................................... 49 2.4.3 Identities in Performances and Interpretation ..................................................... 50 2.4.4 Performance Contexts and Contextualising Contexts as Performance .............. 52 2.4.5 Stance-taking, Ideology and Identity in Metacommentary ................................ 54 2.4.6 Stance and Identity ............................................................................................. 60 iv 2.4.7 Stance and Staged Performance and Performances in Stance-Taking Interactions. ....................................................................................................................... 61 2.5 Chapter Summary ...................................................................................................... 63 3 METHODOLOGY .......................................................................................................... 65 3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 65 3.2 Research Questions .................................................................................................... 66 3.3 A Linguistic Ethnographic Approach to Research Questions ................................... 69 3.3.1 Principles and Practice of Ethnographic Research ............................................. 71 3.3.2 Complexity ......................................................................................................... 71 3.3.3 Language and identity are historically located. .................................................. 72 3.3.4 An Emic Perspective .......................................................................................... 73 3.3.5 Researcher Reflexivity ....................................................................................... 73 3.3.6 Relations of Power ............................................................................................. 74 3.3.7 Linguistics and Ethnography .............................................................................. 75 3.3.8 Possibilities and tensions in linguistic ethnography ........................................... 76 3.3.9 Challenges and Opportunities of Linguistic Ethnography in Kazakhstan .......... 77 3.4 Research and Data Design ......................................................................................... 81 3.4.1 Research context and community. .....................................................................