Partying in Kazakhstan

I attended a banquet last month held in honor of the participants of a conference held at Karaganda State University. Karaganda is about an hour’s flight northwest from Almaty. I had given a paper at the conference and had made several new friends, as you can see in the accompanying photos.

The conference was very interesting in terms of language policy, which is a hot topic in Kazakhstan since there are three languages competing for money, status, and in the case of Kazakh, cultural and linguistic preservation. There was one speaker, an older man – an eminence grise – who gave an impassioned speech in Kazakh about restoring his language to its original status before the Soviets barged in and took over. But now with Russian so entrenched in the government, and English the language of commerce and technology, it is hard to ignore the necessity of teaching all three languages.

At the party for us conferees, who imbibed with relish and without pause the free wine, vodka, and cognac, I watched these wonderful Kazakhs and some ethnic Russian Kazakhstanis dance and celebrate who they are. Entertainment included several singers and lovely, graceful dancers in national costumes. I saw the pride swell among the Kazakhs about their wonderful traditions and culture.


Kazakhs desperately do not want to lose their beloved language. But they know they will lag woefully behind if they do not learn English. They are trying to enlarge the sphere of influence (and diminish Russian’s) by having all government documents translated from Russian into Kazakh by the end of this year. They will not make their deadline, having plowed through only a scant third of those documents as of mid December 2008. But it may have as much to do with the lack of appropriate legalese in Kazakh as it does with the immensity of the task itself.

This obvious pride in one’s language made me think about the time I was in Germany and heard a radio talk show host ask listeners what made them feel most proud about being German. One caller stated that the German language was unquestionably what made him feel that way. I remarked to myself that I had never in my life felt that way about English. Never – not once. I think it’s neat that English boasts a bulging word stock – over 600,000 words (depending on how you count them) and way more than many European languages put together – and that we are unstinting in welcoming new words to be part of our language.

In other cultures, such as many American Indian communities, where many languages are dying, people do what they can to slow the process, such as set up schools for the kids to learn in immersion environments and conduct traditional ceremonies in that language. The president, Nursultan Nazerbaev, himself a Kazakh, has made all signage bilingual (in some cases trilingual), which is great. It increases the status of the language and the possibility that many will absorb it without working at it. But knowing how to say ‘bookstore’ or ‘pharmacy’ in Kazakh is a far cry from giving a speech or reading a book in it.

Nationalistic feelings about preserving Kazakh make the ethnic Russians feel as if they are outsiders. They will naturally feel more and more isolated as Kazakh gains heft. When Russian bus drivers go through Kazakh parts of Almaty – the Kazakhs will not tolerate the bus driver speaking in Russian and respond only in Kazakh. Or at least won’t speak to him in Russian. It’s their small way of rebelling. Just think if the Chinese took over America and decided to forbid everyone to speak in English. I think we Americans would really put up a fight – on the buses, in the streets, and everywhere else. Pity the poor country that tries to do that!

But tonight, it made me feel quite touched to see the Kazakhstani citizens of both Kazakh and Russian decent – dancing together and celebrating who they are. Maybe the booze helped. It wouldn’t be the first difficult relationship that alcohol has helped get through another night.

Speaking at conference in Karaganda

In Kazakhstan, it pays to be flexible. I was scheduled to give a talk the second day of the conference, and planned to refine my talk and PowerPoint slides that first night in my hotel room. But when I arrived today at 10am, having gotten up at 3:30 that morning to catch my flight, the people at the registration desk rushed up to me, threw my ID badge at me, and asked if I could present right then and there, or at least in an hour or so.

I panicked a bit, since this has been my lifelong recurring nightmare – I arrive at the theater and don’t even know what play I’m in let, let alone have my costume or remember any lines. I drew in a big breath and told myself I could do this. But the next problem cropped up – they didn’t have any ability to project my PowerPoint, so now I was faced with redoing my whole talk without having to rely on the slides that would walk the audience through my arguments. So that was out the window. Now I really had to punt. As if that weren’t bad enough, I THEN found out that most of the 200 or so people don’t speak very good or even any English so I needed to have my talk translated, sentence by sentence, even phrase by phrase. This would eat up about half the time. Now I had a grand total of 7 minutes to give a talk. The speakers who preceded me that morning had taken more than their share of the time. So I was under pressure to keep it short and sweet and yet make a point – without slides and while being translated. Oh yeah, this is the stuff nightmares are made of.

But I pulled it off! I actually think it was a pretty good talk. I didn’t cover very much, and I repeated my main point – that students don’t need more grammar to learn how to write better; they need to learn how to think. And that goes for any student, anywhere, writing in any language. I allowed as how they would probably write more in their native language, but it would not necessarily be better organized. Most teachers don’t think about that.

Afterwards one teacher came up to me to ask if I thought that by asking students to listen to a story and then recording it from memory would help them do critical thinking. I had to state unequivocally no, that it would not because they need to be generating their own ideas and then weighing the arguments. Copying someone’s ideas doesn’t have anything to do with critical thinking. I hate to say it, but that’s pretty typical Kazakhstani thinking that by copying someone’s ideas you are actually teaching someone how to write. I said that it probably helped with sentence structure – because they had a model, and perhaps vocabulary, but it was not encouraging any kind of higher level thinking. She looked totally bemused about how to even approach such a task, and asked if I ever traveled to Karaganda to give seminars.