The Sociolinguistic Attitudes of Kazakhs Towards the Latin Alphabet and Orthography Reform in Kazakh
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THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC ATTITUDES OF KAZAKHS TOWARDS THE LATIN ALPHABET AND ORTHOGRAPHY REFORM IN KAZAKH Raua-Banu Kadirova A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Linguistics Chapel Hill 2018 Approved by: David Mora-Marin Paul Roberge Michael J. Terry © 2018 Raua-Banu Kadirova ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Raua-Banu Kadirova: 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. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This master’s thesis would not have been completed without the collaboration of a number of individuals who generously and graciously contributed their time, knowledge, skills and resources. First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis advisor, David Mora-Marin, for his guidance, expertise, insightful thoughts, and openness which continually facilitated the progress of my work throughout my studies. This thesis is a direct result of the ‘Sociolinguistics’ class taught by him when I was actively exploring the topic. I would also like to thank the rest of my committee, Paul Roberge and Mike J. Terry, for their insightful comments and suggestions, and encouragements on pursuing this topic further. I would like to thank Teresa Edwards at the Odum Institute for her statistical analysis and advise. Also, I would like to thank my friend and colleague, Haley Boone, for correcting grammatical errors and helping with the IRB application. To my own family and family in law. Particularly, my husband and a little daughter for their patience and support: I am just as certain that without their helps, this thesis would not be completed. Although I am clearly indebted to several people for the completion of this project, any oversights or errors in fact or judgment contained herewithin are my responsibility alone. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................ vii LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: SOCIOLINGUISTIC BACKGROUND OF KAZAKHSTAN AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO WRITTEN KAZAKH LANGUAGE ............................ 5 1.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 5 1.2 Sociolinguistic and Historical Background of Kazakhstan and its languages. ............................. 5 1.3 Historical Background to Written Language and Language Reforms ........................................ 10 1.3.1. The Old Turkic Scripts (the Orkhon-Yenisey) .................................................................... 10 1.3.2 The Arabic Script and its Replacement by Latin script ....................................................... 12 1.3.3 The Latin Script and its Replacement by Cyrillic script...................................................... 19 1.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 22 CHAPTER 2: HISTORY OF LANGUAGE POLICIES RELATED TO KAZAKH ............. 23 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 23 2.2 Language Policy in the Pre-Soviet Era ....................................................................................... 23 2.3 Language Policy of the Soviet Era ............................................................................................. 28 2.4 Language Policy of an Independent Kazakhstan ........................................................................ 36 2.5 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 40 3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 41 3.2 The Alphabet Reform of Turks................................................................................................... 41 3.3 The Alphabet Reform of three Post-Soviet Republics................................................................ 44 3.3.1 The Republic of Azerbaijan ................................................................................................. 45 v 3.3.2 The Republic of Uzbekistan ................................................................................................. 50 3.3.3 The Republic of Kazakhstan ................................................................................................ 56 3.4. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 62 4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 64 4.2 Administrative-territorial structure of Kazakhstan and Connection of Language use with Historical Events............................................................................................................................... 65 4.3. Methods ..................................................................................................................................... 69 4.4. Discussion and Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 77 5.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 80 5.2 Pear and Social Stereotypes ........................................................................................................ 81 5.3 Lambert’s Matched Guise Test ................................................................................................... 82 5.4 Methods to measure linguistic attitudes ..................................................................................... 86 5.5 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 88 6.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 90 6.2 The Current Study ...................................................................................................................... 90 6.3 General Results ........................................................................................................................... 94 6.4 Statistically significant results according to age, gender and social status categories. ............. 101 6.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 110 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 112 APPENDIX: B ....................................................................................................................... 119 APPENDIX: C ....................................................................................................................... 133 REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................... 134 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The map of Kazakhstan (taken from Wikipedia.org) ............................................... 65 Figure 2. The ‘Ishil’ hotel in Tselinograd and the ‘Dom Odezhdy’ shopping mall in Uralsk . 67 Figure 3.‘Dzhezkazgan’ hotel and a movie theater in Karaganda ........................................... 67 Figure 4. Pictures of cities of Kazakh SSR in the end of 1980s .............................................. 68 Figure 5. The frequency of occurrence of a language type in signage of street names ........... 71 Figure 6. The equal use of both Kazakh and Russian in signage of street names ................... 71 Figure 7. Street names