Hi Everyone,

My name is Regina and I’m a PH.D. candidate at Boston Unviversity, Boston, MA, US.  My main focus is on Kyrgyz language reform, planning and purism.  Below is the description and preliminary results of my pilot study on Kyrgyz Russian Language Contact and Attitudes.  The goal of this post is to solicit as much opinions and critique as possible. 

Since the Perestroika era in Russia, many minority languages and cultures have undergone reverse Russification (adoption and integration of the Russian language and its attributes, voluntarily or not, by non-Russian communities1). For example, if we look at the Baltic languages—Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian—after their respective countries became independent and joined Wester Europe, they re-emerged and began being spoken widely, if not exclusively. A new wave of nationalism, especially in the cultural, religious, and linguistic spheres of life, re-appeared, giving the peoples of those countries a new chance to celebrate their ethnic heritage: publicly and openly speaking in the language that used to be spoken only in their households, singing pop and rock songs in their own language, producing films reflecting new and old national identity and attitude, promoting patriotism, generating new slang in their native tongue, observing religious and cultural traditions and holidays that earlier were not widely acknowledged or accepted.

The facts and attributes, that defined the indigenous peoples of those countries but were forgotten, were now welcomed. Construction, or to be precise, re-construction of the national identities, however, has been co-occurring with the linguistic revival and further development. The two phenomena have been virtually inseparable from one another.

If the Baltic countries were successful in their complete and more or less smooth transition from being a part of the USSR to becoming Western European countries, it certainly was not the case with the Central Asian countries. The latter still have strong economic and political ties with the Russian Federation which may be the ruling factors in their linguistic and cultural transitions. Additionally, due to the lack of thorough language planning and standardization procedures, Central Asian languages remain severely undescribed and understudied by local and foreign linguists and anthropologists.

The planning that has been done so far in these countries is merely a slow integration of the indigenous languages into the mass media, school systems (K-12 mostly but not at a University level) as well as in a service sphere (transportation, local government offices such as town halls, and hospital administration are now including these languages in their daily operation). Lack of economic resources to facilitate adequate language planning and its implementation may be the major reason why Central Asian languages are not fully integrated in the contemporary Central Asian societies (Korth 2003). However, what the policies and planning that are currently in effect do not gauge is that the ethnical minorities are now excluded from those nations (Kuchekeeva and O’Loughlin 2003)—language suddenly became not only a symbol of emerging national identity but also a cultural and linguistic barrier for the peoples within those nations.

I would like to focus strictly on Kyrgyzstan and its political and linguistic situations after it gained independence from Russia in 1991. Language planning and reform including conversion from the Cyrillic alphabet to Latin alphabet have become pivotal in Kyrgyz national identity building. A crucial and integral part of this posting will be dedicated to discussing a Kyrgyz Russian language attitude survey (available upon request from the author) I designed based on a model created by Sebastian Thomas (2005) for Jamaican Language Attitude Survey. The piloted survey is in its very initial, raw stages and needs much refinement. When trying it out, my goal was to define how it could be improved or modified to achieve my bigger research pursuit—to identify how Kyrgyz citizens (ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic minorities of Kyrgyzstan) feel about the Kyrgyz Russian situation in Kyrgyzstan and if they feel that “Pure” Kyrgyz, sans Russian loanwords is possible, and additionally, if it will be attained, as Baltic languages did (Schulter: an online document2).

The survey I piloted on Kyrgyz Russian Language Attitudes is only one part of my proposed research project on Kyrgyz-Russian language contact and code-mixing. In 2006 I applied for and received funding from the International Research Exchange (IREX) organization that promotes Humanities research in the Central Asian region. The research questions I will attempt to investigate are, “What are the political, anthropological, and sociolinguistic factors that influence and reinforce the Kyrgyz Russian language-switching, mixing, and borrowing? Is “Pure” Kyrgyz possible?”

In this context, I would like to have a close look at the Kyrgyz Russian language contact on a daily basis and the factors that change the contemporary Kyrgyz language and younger generation’s attitude towards them.

As mentioned earlier, this survey is only one part of the data collection for the proposed research on Russian Kyrgyz code-mixing, code-switching, and borrowing. It was designed on Thomas’s model of a language attitude survey in Jamaica (see Appendix B). I modified it by adding “associative” questions, e.g. “What associations do you have when you hear the word ‘Russia/Kyrgyzstan?’” I created 4 areas of language attitudes I would like to measure with my questionnaire: Demographics (gender, age, nationality, occupation, and education); Language Awareness, Use and Context (associative questions and questions on the daily usage of language(s)), and the last area—Writing in a Standard form.

Originally I wanted to ask only ethnic Kyrgyz speakers to complete my survey to see if I could measure their attitude towards Russian or Russia as a neighboring country; however, then I thought that if I do not include Kyrgyzstani representatives of other ethnicities (Kazakhs, Tatars, Russians, Ukrainians etc. who reside in Kyrgyzstan and are Kyrgyz by citizenship as opposed by ethnic belonging), then I will only measure attitudes of one group of the Kyrgyz representatives. It is important to capture language/culture opinions and attitudes from various Kyrgyz populations, not only from the indigenous people. This means that my participants will be divided into 2 groups: Kyrgyz by ethnicity and Kyrgyz by citizenship status.

The survey was piloted on 5 Kyrgyz representatives who are currently graduate students at Harvard University. The survey aims to solicit data about these participants’ attitudes towards Russian and Kyrgyz—where the former is the language that they grew up with hearing it at home, school, streets, most of the social/public environments and have been speaking all their lives and the latter is the language that they feel is their heritage but is not quite functional in their everyday life. One of them is an ethnic Tatar who was born and lived all her life in Bishkek. She is fluent but not literate in Tatar and understands Kyrgyz. Her fluency level in Kyrgyz is intermediate. The demographic details about the pilot survey participants are shown in a table below:

Demographic Variables for Survey (N=5)

Gender Female=2

Male=3
Nationality Russian=0

Kyrgyz=4

Other (Tatar)=1
Age Groups 21, 22, 24,25, and 26 years old

A chi-square analysis on the relationships between the variables will be performed when the sample is more sizable and representative. I will specifically focus on the following relationships:

* gender and Language Awareness, Use and Context variables
* education and Language Awareness, Use and Context variables
* nationality and Language Awareness, Use and Context variables
* age and Language Awareness, Use and Context variables
* gender and Writing in a Standard form variables
* education and Writing in a Standard form variables
* nationality and Writing in a Standard form variables
* age and Writing in a Standard form variables

These relationships will reveal the participants’ language attitudes as well the current usage of Russian and Kyrgyz as reflected by the self-reported answers of the participants.

There outcome of the pilot survey was very interesting. I encouraged the participants to write responses in Russian, English, Kyrgyz or their respective native tongues—especially, when answering associative questions. The age of the 5 participants varied from 21 to 26 years old, which is not very representative and was due to the fact that it was very difficult to find Kyrgyz subjects in the greater Boston area. All but one (Kyrgyz male) considered themselves bilingual (Kyrgyz Russian—3 of them, and Kyrgyz Tatar—1 female mentioned above).

On the question which language they consider their native tongue, only 1 male participant answered Kyrgyz, whereas the rest answered Russian. On the question in which language they speak with their parents, 2 male participants answered Kyrgyz, and the rest (2 female and 1 male participants) answered Russian. On the question in which language the participants speak to their friends/significant others, 4 responded “Russian” and 1 (male) participant responded “both—Russian and Kyrgyz.” On the question in which language they speak to their grandparents, 2 male participants responded “Kyrgyz,” 1 participant responded “Tatar/Russian” and 2 participants (1 male and 1 female) responded “Russian/Kyrgyz.” On the question in which participants were asked which language they read the newspapers in, 4 responded “Russian” and 1 responded “English.”

On the question what they would think if Kyrgyz would be the only federal language of Kyrgyzstan, the participants gave me very mixed responses: 3 (1 male and 2 female) participants responded that it would be difficult for the other non-Kyrgyz speaking peoples to live in Kyrgyzstan (one of them was an ethnic minority representative, the other two, ethnic Kyrgyz—one of whom wrote her response in Russian), whereas 2 males said they supported the idea of Kyrgyz being the only federal language of Kyrgyzstan because “it would be beneficial for the consequent generations.” On the question what associations they have with the words “Russia” and “Kyrgyzstan” the respondents provided the following answers:

1 male

Russia: “Work” because he traveled to Moscow from Kyrgyzstan to work as a fiscal auditor.

Kyrgyzstan: “Home”

1 female

Russia: “Huge. Superpower (in Russian). Rich in oil, gas, natural resources, Great 8, Putin.”

Kyrgyzstan: “Small, mountainous country, nomadic, hospitality, potential but unstable.”

1 female

Russia: neighboring country (in Russian)

Kyrgyzstan: home, beauty, mountains, lakes (in Russian)

1 male

Russia: just another country which you know is better than others

Kyrgyzstan: homeland

1 male

Russia: Former Soviet Union

Kyrgyzstan: Motherland

On the question in which language they think, the participants answered Russian. On the question in which language they pray, all 5 answered “Arabic” which I expected since prayers in Turkic languages seem universally to be Arabic. The answer could have been different if some of the ethnic minority representatives were Russian or Ukrainian since they usually belong to the Christian Orthodox Church.

When asked the question whether or not there should be strictly monolingual Kyrgyz or bilingual Kyrgyz/Russian schools, all 5 including 1 ethnic minority participant answered “Bilingual Kyrgyz/Russian schools.”

On the question whether there should be Cyrillic or Latin scripts (from the Writing in a Standard Form area), 4 answered “Cyrillic” and 1 answered “Latin.”

One significant question that I designed to solicit the associative data on the perceptions and stereotypes of ethnic Kyrgyz and Russian people by my participants was answered only by 1 person, the 4 others did not respond at all. It may be due to the design of the question—the participants may have very well found it cumbersome. It is also possible that the instructions were not explicit or clear. The question itself was presented in the following way:

When you hear a person speaking Kyrgyz and another speaking Russian, which person do you think (put an X where applicable—please follow the example below):

Question Kyrgyz Russian
Example:

Is more culturally adept

X
a. is more intelligent
b. is more honest
c. is more friendly
d. has more money
e. has more money
f. is more helpful in critical and dangerous situations

The respondent that did answer this question, thought that a Russian-speaking person is more intelligent, educated and has more money, whereas a Kyrgyz person is more honest, helpful in critical/dangerous situations and friendlier. This question needs a lot of refinement. To make it more user-friendly, instead of using a table, I will pose separate questions as shown below:

Answer the following questions:

In your opinion, who is more honest:

_____a Kyrgyz person _______a Russian person

In your opinion, who is more educated

_____a Kyrgyz person _______a Russian person:

This way of presenting questions may be easier for the participants to follow and answer.

My final question in the survey was on whether the participants want to have this survey in Kyrgyz—all unanimously answered that they did not want it to be typed in Kyrgyz. Some of them put “No” in bold, all capital letters with exclamation points and two of them wrote “???!” which means “No” in Russian.

In general, I believe the survey yielded interesting results—especially the fact that some participants responded in Russian instead of English—this, too, reflects their language attitude, since they had a choice in what language to respond to the survey. I did not run any kind of statistical analysis on the answers of these 5 participants because the sample was too small to do so. In the future, I believe it would be more meaningful to look at the results of 50 participants instead of 5 people, and run the statistical correlational analysis.

I believe that upon administering the survey on the sizable sample and interpreting the results, I will gain a better understanding of what questions I should ask during my sociolinguistic interviews. It is also possible I may need to administer focus groups instead of sociolinguistic interviews. The final goal of my proposed research is not only to gain insight on the Russian Kyrgyz contact situation and the facts that shape contemporary Kyrgyz as the new, competing language of Kyrgyzstan, but also to contribute to the studies in the Central Asian languages and sociolinguistics.