Multilingual academic publishing in Kazakhstan: language shifts during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Yerkezhan Kurmanbek, Zhanar Ibrayeva, Vladislava Warditz

Frontiers in Education, 2026

Full text Open access: Gold Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.3389/feduc.2026.1949866
Data confidence 70 medium
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Abstract

This study aims to examine changes in the distribution of Kazakh-, Russian-, and English-language publications during and after the COVID-19 pandemic using the Eurasian Journal of Philology: Science and Education as a case study. The corpus comprises 535 articles published in Kazakh, Russian, and English between 2020 and 2025, including 278 articles from the pandemic period (2020–2022) and 257 from the post-pandemic period (2023–2025). The corpus was analysed using quantitative methods, keyword analysis, and scientometric techniques. Publication patterns were compared across the periods 2020–2022 and 2023–2025, with particular attention to the interplay between language choice, thematic focus, and the journal's disciplinary sections, including linguistics, literary studies, language teaching methodology, and translation studies. The findings reveal a statistically significant shift in the distribution of publication languages between the pandemic and post-pandemic periods, although the magnitude of the association was small. This shift was characterized by an increase in Kazakh-language publications from 38.1% to 47.1%, a decline in Russian-language publications from 30.2% to 21.0%, and a stable proportion of English-language publications (31.7% vs. 31.9%). The findings suggest changing patterns of language choice that may reflect shifting perceptions of linguistic prestige and the evolving roles of Kazakh, Russian, and English in academic communication. These trends reflect broader sociolinguistic transformations in the multilingual context of Kazakhstan, illustrating the interaction between internationalization of academic discourse, local language policy, and individual language use in multilingual settings.