Abstract
The article deals with the issue of bilingualism and performance of necessary communicative functions by the state language, when the official status of the language is in contradiction with the real communicative possibilities. The research is conducted on the example of state of language of north Kazakhstan represented by mass Kazakh–Russian bilingualism. The research techniques were worked out on the basis of questionnaires of situation analysis and differential technique with the calculation of the coefficient of preference of one or another language by ethnical Kazakhs. The article defines the reasons of the choice of the language in certain everyday situations. The choice of Kazakh as the main language is often motivated by ethnical self-identity of Kazakhstan residents. The language in which respondents were educated is also a decisive factor in preferring Kazakh or Russian in various situations. The research also determined a disturbing tendency of general preference of Russian by young respondents, loss of position of Kazakh in information space, and as a means of acquiring knowledge, wrong notion about the native language. Study of public functions of languages in the situations of bilingualism using differential technique, as it was done in this study, allows objectively estimating the state of language and defining the extralinguistic factor that determines this state and states the language problem correctly.