INFLUENCE OF MULTILINGUALISM AND BILINGUALISM ON YOUTH LANGUAGE IN KAZAKHSTAN: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF INTERNET RESOURSES

The paper deals with a specific multilingual situation in Kazakhstan and its influence on youth communication. Youth discourse vividly illustrates current cultural and linguistic degree of modern society, and it helps to predict its future development and direction. A lot of modern new slang, jargons, hybrid words and other youngsters’ linguistic inventions in speech have become a usual tendency of standard language as well, as they have been steadily fixed as normal. The same principle is obvious about language interference and code switching which takes place in a bilingual communication environment. The current work presents a part of the overall research of youth interaction in a multicultural language situation. And in the framework of this paper we argue that Internet language can be a serious illustration of the way the youth language penetrate into the standard one including media, politics, everyday adults’ speech. In order to demonstrate the issue, we present a thorough discourse analysis of the language materials of YouTube channel as a resource of youth code-switching and interference. The investigation involves popular youth channels including video clips, comedy shows and movie trailers. The analysis has shown a strong mixture of Kazakh, Russian and active inclusion of English as a language of prestige and high social status. We also display language inclusions which were historically borrowed from Russian by youth, and have become an inseparable part of modern national language. The matter of Russian influenced by Kazakh is an interesting object of scrutiny as well, as current state of everyday Russian in Kazakhstan differs significantly from that of Russia.   

Keywords: Youth language, standard language, Internet discourse, multilingualism, bilingualism.