The citizens of the Republic of Kazakhstan rightly regard
themselves as among the first to assault the monolith of the Soviet
Government: in December of 1986, the Zheltoqsan uprisings over the
sacking of the Kazakh chair of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Kazakh SSR, Dinmukhamed Qunaev, and his replacement by an
ethnic Russian, Gennadij Kolbin, were the first violent crack in the
edifice of Soviet power in the late 1980s. That the enactment of the
language law of 1989 was among the first major undertakings of
Nursultan Nazarbaev signaled both a further policy shift from
monolithic russification, and a symbolic gesture measure of
self-determination for the ethnic Kazakhs of the Kazakh SSR (Williams,
1997, makes a clear case for the linkage between nationalism,
self-identification, and language policy). In 1995, Kazakh was
declared the government language, and accorded the role of the
language of national integration. Russian was declared the language of
political integration, and given official status (see Kopylenko, 1999,
for an attempt to delineate these functions). The current Kazakhstan
2030 plan calls for all citizens to be (at least) trilingual by
2030—in Kazakh, Russian, and one foreign language. The basic
question for the researcher in Kazakhstan in 1999, ten years after the
passage of the language law, and eight years after the fall of the
USSR and the somewhat reluctant independence of Kazakhstan, is: have
these (and other) measures had any appreciable affect on language
choice and language use in Kazakhstan? More specifically, what is the
extent of language shift? What are the factors motivating first,
second, and foreign language choice among Kazakhstanis? What attitudes
and aspirations are held, regarding languages? The proposed paper will
assay these questions through the examination of biographical,
demographic, attitudinal, and behavioral data collected from 857
Kazakhstani college students at seven institutions of higher learning
in Kazakhstan. The field work was conducted during the Spring Semester
of 1999. Among the notable results are that 67% of Kazakhstani college
students claim some knowledge of English; that, while 98% of the
ethnic Kazakh population claims Kazakh as its