Abstract
The relevance of this study stems from the growing conflict-generating potential of digital crisis communication in multilingual post-Soviet societies and from the limited development of its sociolinguistic analysis as an autonomous discursive phenomenon. The article aims to identify and describe stable sociolinguistic and discursive mechanisms that produce interpretive conflict in digital crisis communication, drawing on institutional and user-generated public discourse. The study follows a qualitative, interpretive-analytical approach and analyzes a multilingual corpus of 730 texts from open digital sources in Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The methodology integrates sociolinguistic analysis, critical discourse analysis, and qualitative interpretation, with comparative attention to strategies of nomination, subjectivity, pragmatic orientation, and language code. The study advances a conceptualization of digital crisis communication as an autonomous arena of interpretive conflict shaped by linguistic and discursive asymmetries among actors in the digital public sphere. The findings show that conflictual interpretations recur through stable strategies, including emotive-evaluative, accusatory, and framing strategies, across crisis topics and national contexts. The results highlight language code, register, and public expression strategies as key factors in redistributing interpretive power and intensifying discursive tension in digitally multilingual settings.