Аңдатпа
Recent sociolinguistic research has increasingly focused on the multilingual practices of student youth as one of the most socially active groups and among the first to respond to ongoing changes in language use. This article investigates language mixing in the everyday communication of university students and examines how grammatical fusion emerges in informal multilingual interactions outside the classroom. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, including textual and semantic analyses of qualitative data obtained from audio recordings of naturally occurring conversations among students in Uralsk, one of the largest urban centers in Western Kazakhstan. The analysis focuses on the linguistic features of multilingual speech and the semantic classification of hybrid lexical units resulting from language contact. The findings reveal that grammatical fusion is a common feature of students’ everyday speech and reflects a high degree of multilingual linguistic competence. Three major fusion patterns were identified: (1) Russian lexical stems combined with Kazakh affixes, (2) English lexical stems combined with Kazakh affixes, and (3) Kazakh lexical stems combined with Russian suffixes and inflectional endings. Type I was found to be the most frequent, whereas Type III occurred least often. The study also demonstrates significant differences in the classification of hybrid lexical units, particularly those combining English and Kazakh elements, which are predominantly perceived as mixed language forms. The results highlight the active and systematic role of grammatical fusion in multilingual communication and provide an indigenous perspective on contemporary language practices in Kazakhstan. The findings contribute to a better understanding of multilingualism in everyday interaction and may serve as a basis for reconsidering approaches to language contact and multilingual language use in the local sociolinguistic context.