Influence of Multilingualism and Bilingualism on Youth Language in Kazakhstan: Discourse Analysis of Internet Resources

Kazakhstan, ID CLEaR2015-246;

The paper focuses on the problems of youth language in the case of multilingual society. Youth discourse reflects unstable cultural and linguistic state of a society. In different stages of the history youngsters were united by common interests, and most of all by the consciousness of brotherhood and alienation from the rest of society, i.e. representatives of other age groups. Those youth communities invented their own special ways of verbal and written communication. Today the situation is the same in modern Kazakhstani society. Multilingualism in Kazakhstan is a natural situation. This multilingualism influences the youth speech, forms new language expressions at the junction of several contact languages because of code-switching and interference which are inevitable phenomena. In the article we make discourse analysis of youth language from Internet which illustrates the influence of these phenomena on the interesting forms of thought expression. We also give a lively example of youth language interferences which have already become a tendency and habitual expressions among the whole group which prove the influence and power of youth speech in changing the whole language. 

Keywords: Youth language, multilingualism, language contact, code-switching, interference