TRANSLANGUAGING IN THE SPEECH PRACTICES OF KAZAKH–RUSSIAN-ENGLISH BILINGUALS: COGNITIVE, PRAGMATIC, AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS

Abstract

This scientific article investigates translanguaging practices among Kazakh–Russian–English bilingual speakers, focusing on their cognitive, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic dimensions. Drawing on contemporary theories of translanguaging and multilingual competence, the research challenges traditional views of bilingualism that conceptualize languages as separate and autonomous systems.

The study employs a mixed-methods approach combining a philological experiment, discourse analysis, and frequency-based analysis of multilingual speech data. The experimental design includes cognitive, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic tasks that allow unrestricted language use in order to elicit natural translanguaging behavior. The corpus consists of audio-recorded and transcribed speech produced by 30 bilingual participants.

The results demonstrate that translanguaging is a systematic and purposeful communicative practice rather than random language mixing. Findings reveal that bilingual speakers activate an integrated multilingual repertoire in response to cognitive demands, communicative goals, and sociolinguistic context. Translanguaging functions as a cognitive strategy facilitating lexical retrieval and fluency, a pragmatic resource enhancing interactional effectiveness, and a sociolinguistic mechanism for identity construction and negotiation. The functional distribution of Kazakh, Russian, and English reflects clear patterns of specialization shaped by domain, interlocutor, and language ideology. The study contributes to translanguaging research by providing empirical evidence from an underexplored trilingual. It expands existing theoretical frameworks by demonstrating the complexity of translanguaging practices beyond binary language models and highlights implications for sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and multilingual education.