Half of All Kazakhstan Residents Get Their News from Kazakh Language Sources, with Third a Using Both Kazakh and Russian Outlets, and Only a Fifth Russian Ones Alone, ‘Demoscope’ Poll Shows

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 31 – Russian commentators, especially those in Moscow, continue to insist on a regular basis that most Kazakhs know Russian and use it widely despite the increasing share of ethnic Kazakhs and self-declared Kazakh speakers in the population of that Central Asian country.

            But a new and representative survey conducted by the Demoscope Bureau for the Express Monitoring of Public Opinion calls those Russian claims at least in part into question (vlast.kz/novosti/68864-osnovnym-istocnikom-informacii-dla-kazahstancev-ostautsa-socseti-opros-demoscope.html).

            It found that 45.4 percent of the population of Kazakhstan prefers to get news and information in Kazakh rather than Russian, that 31.1 percent use sources in both languages, and only 21.1 percent choose to use Russian language outlets, the final figure being only slightly larger than the share of ethnic Russians in the population.

            What this suggests if not proves is that Kazakh is becoming the language of public use in that country even among Kazakhs who know both languages and that the share of ethnic Kazakhs who prefer to use Russian to get their news is quite small and likely will continue to decline.