The 'de-colonisation' of young Kazakhs
Forty per cent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 say they always speak Kazakh, in the family and in all environments, while above the age of 60 this percentage drops to 25 per cent. And many ironically say that Putin has done more for the Kazakh language in one year than Nazarbayev did in 30 years.
Astana (AsiaNews) - With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the term "de-colonisation" has become very fashionable in many former Soviet countries. It basically means the de-Russification of the former Soviet republics, which are less and less willing to remain under Moscow's control.
Especially the younger generations, who have not breathed the air of the past regime, increasingly reject the very use of the language of the old masters. The Kazakh section of the BBC carried out a very significant survey among them.
Kazakhstan is perhaps the country where the issue is most keenly felt, as recounted by 20-year-old Mira Ungarova, who is now ashamed of how hard she tried in primary schools to learn the Russian language well so as "not to be like a Kazakh girl", the derogatory term the Russians use to call Kazakh girls.
For her, everything changed in 2019, when the eternal president-patron Nazarbayev left office: 'for me and my peers it was a real shock, and we started to think that we could change something in our country'. Today Mira is one of thousands of activists for the 'recovery of national identity'.
Of Kazakhstan's 20 million inhabitants, there are about 6 million Russian speakers, who live mainly in the big cities. People aged 30 and over use Russian fluently, albeit rather ungrammatically, while young people no longer want to learn it. Today, Russian-speaking Kazakhs are also called nedokazaki, 'not quite' Kazakhs who have lost touch with their roots and culture.
After the Second World War, by Stalin's order, higher education in Central Asian countries could only be taught in Russian, and 'in the 1970s-1980s, only Russian speakers were educated', as the young researcher Aynaš Mustojapova, author of 'De-colonisation in Kazakhstan', explains. This led not only to 'colonial thinking', but also to 'self-alienation', when Kazakhs were ashamed of their own culture, Aynaš argues.
Now everything is changing rapidly, and all polls and surveys reveal a great demand for the Kazakh language, in education as well as in social life, e.g. the increasing popularity of TV programmes and films in Kazakh: the second episode of the American blockbuster Avatar was almost only seen in the local language version.
According to the sociological foundation 'Friedrich Albert', 40 per cent of people between 18 and 29 years of age say they always speak Kazakh, within the family and in all environments, while above 60 years of age this percentage drops to 25 per cent.
It is precisely the world of art and entertainment that is becoming one of the privileged fields of identity recovery, as in the case of the great popularity of the very young singer Sayagul Birlesbek, who combines the folk songs of the ancient nomads with the rhythms and melodies of contemporary folk music.
The 30-year-old filmmaker and painter Suinbike Suleymenova remembers the repressions against her great-grandfather, who was accused of Kazakh nationalism, so much so that her grandfather was delivered by her grandmother in a lager for 'traitors to the homeland'.
Sayagul's parents, a sculptor and a musician, hardly spoke any Kazakh, and she herself has been on a long journey of rediscovering her true nature since she painted the picture I am Kazakh in 2012.
Kazakhs ironically claim that Putin has done more for the Kazakh language in one year, than Nazarbayev did in 30 years: with the invasion of Ukraine, the need for de-colonisation has become imperious, and increasingly discussed in all media, public and private. For the Kazakhs, it is clear that the motivation for the horrors caused by the war is primarily the imposition of language, the only real reason for conflict between Russians and Ukrainians on the territory of the Donbass in the preceding years.
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31/03/2022 09:54
