In Front of the Many: Language and Public Life in Kazakhstan's Largest City

Abstract

This dissertation examines how citizens in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, work to make the Kazakh language an ordinary medium of public life. Although the state has promoted Kazakh for more than three decades since independence, Russian remains the default language of efficiency, civility, and urban order. Based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews, and media analysis, the study follows independent publishers, consumer activists, and conversation clubs as they work to make Kazakh not just a marker of national identity, but a language of everyday use. I argue that sincerity—doing things willingly and with feeling—functions as a developmental affect among my interlocutors, a sign that society is moving beyond a socialist past remembered for its top-down coordination of collective life. During the Soviet period, public life in Kazakhstan was organized through a dense network of institutions that operated largely in Russian. After independence, that system unraveled. While the Kazakhstani state elevates Kazakh as the “state language” and links its vitality to national modernization, it lacks the kind of authoritative capacity that once organized public life under socialism, and cannot openly act as if it did. As a result, the realization of ‘the public’ is left to be worked out elsewhere. In this gap between proclamation and enactment, citizens labor to do what the state does not: make Kazakh usable as a shared language among strangers. In Part I, I show how independent publishers treat market-based demand as evidence of genuine desire and quality as a sign of sincere care, aiming to make Kazakh a medium for accessing a wider world without Russian mediation. In Part II, I show how consumer activists and ordinary citizens mobilize linguistic and consumer rights—despite unreliable enforcement—through polite, procedural requests, in order to make service in Kazakh the expected default rather than exception. In Part III, I show how conversation clubs support a chosen desire to practice and learn Kazakh through cultivating a distinctive type of togetherness, which collaboratively reworks shame and gives hesitant participants a space to practice appearing publicly as legitimate speakers. Through these practices of “developing the language,” people seek to make social life feel coherent, shared, and oriented toward a common future. The Kazakh phrase köpşiliktiñ aldında (“in front of the many”), which can be glossed as both “publicly” and “before others,” captures how these everyday encounters among strangers make ‘the public’ itself tangible—an imagined collective moving forward through Kazakh as a shared civic language.