Öz Tilin Bilu: Kazakh and Azerbaijani Multilingualism in an Educational Context

The status and function of language are intricately cohesive values as both causes and symptoms of a nation’s history and identity. Each of the 15 republics that once composed the territories of the Soviet Union possess their own sociolinguistic environments that are both unique and mutually exclusive to one another due to selective concessions present in Soviet language policy. One can interpret efforts to advocate for language reform as a function of what the titular population viewed as ensuring a capable state through ‘their own’ language. Moscow, in acknowledging these concerns and granting the establishment of now-legitimized state languages for these republics during the Soviet era, had deepened an aspect of language ecology for each of the republics that still define the political, social, economic, and educational genomes of each of these states in present day.
This study is a multi-faceted scholarly work examining the modern contexts of proposed trilingual education policy in a comparison between two nations - the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Kazakhstan. Each of these nations represent important cases in the relationship between symbolic and substantive policy adoption, in that their aspirations for promulgating trilingual education policy are predicated on disparate conceptualizations of identity through knowledge of state language. This study is an attempt to bridge the gap between established scholarship on post-Soviet Turkic multilingualism over the last thirty years and modern projections of education quality with respect to language of instruction. In addition, a phenomenon known as policy-practice decoupling serves as a central framework to analyze instances of departure from stated and enacted policy between both republics, answering questions regarding each nation's unique sociolinguistic and historical heritage through language and language policy under the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire.
Motivations for symbolically adopting a policy can take on many forms, and tendencies for following educational standards created by external influences can be ascribed to characteristics of developing and developed nations. In relation to language-of-education policy, I argue that these two countries do not neatly fit into either decoupling tendencies – neither that of developed nor developing – due to their own unique sociolinguistic, demographic, and economic makeups. Moreover, their own unique instances of policy-practice decoupling represent poignantly distinct contexts of language-identity relationships owing to unique forms of settler-and-exploitation-based colonization under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The educational frameworks and policies for trilingual education may seem similar in proposed goals and roles for each language (heritage, modernity, and “groupness”). However, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan’s motivations for – and infrastructure for proposing, adopting, and developing – trilingual education are a direct investiture of each state’s conceptualization of language. These conceptualizations affect heritage, identity, and responsibility for citizens and government – values that widely contrast between both countries post-independence.