Heritage Language Maintenance and Identity: Perspectives of Kazakh Emigrants living Abroad

Abstract

Situated within Family Language Planning Policy (FLPP) as conceptualized by Spolsky (2013) and Curdt-Christiansen (2014), this study investigates how Kazakh emigrant families maintain Kazakh as a heritage language abroad and how this process intersects with identity, motivation, and family dynamics. While heritage language maintenance is well documented among Spanish, Chinese, and Korean communities abroad, how Kazakh emigrant families preserve their language remains largely unexplored. Drawing on qualitative narrative inquiry (Creswell & Poth, 2013), the study analyzes semi-structured interviews with eight Kazakh diaspora members residing primarily in Australia and Italy, including mothers, community organizers, and heritage learners. Data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2021) six-phase thematic analysis framework. The findings reveal that family language policies exist on a spectrum from spontaneous, unplanned use to deliberate, structured management, with the responsibility of language maintenance falling predominantly on mothers. Participants express a deep connection between Kazakh and their cultural identity yet face formidable challenges including a critical shortage of quality resources, parental linguistic mismatches, societal misrecognition, and emotional burdens of guilt and exhaustion. Despite these constraints, families demonstrate agency by creating self-published books, “Kazakh-corners,” community schools, cultural associations, book clubs, etc. The study also documents a consistent receptive-productive gap in children’s language development, a pattern noted in heritage language research by Polinsky and Scontras (2019). Despite structural scarcities and uncertain intergenerational outcomes, participants persist in building bottom-up infrastructure that sustain Kazakh identity across generations. These findings contribute to FLP theory by highlighting linguistic complexities within both co-ethnic and mixed families, gendered labor, and diaspora agency in contexts of limited institutional support.