ICSC Member Blog: Why do people from Kazakhstan speak Russian?
Since I moved to the U.S. for graduate school, people here tend to think that I am Chinese or Japanese first time they see me. But, I like to see how their faces become confused when I start to speak and they hear my (quite notable) Russian accent. And the faces become even more confused when I say that I am not from Russia, but that Russian is my native language. It is important to emphasize that there exists a Kazakh language, and it is spoken by most of the population in Kazakhstan now. But Russian remains very common – almost everyone in my home country at least understands it. Its official status in Kazakhstan is a language of intercultural communication (if I translate it correctly). But how did it happen? There are not only geographical reasons for that. People familiar with the world history of the 20th century may immediately say that another reason for that is the fact that Kazakhstan was a part of Soviet Union. And they will be right. To some degree. In sixties, the Soviet g...