ИСТИНА

In recent years, the economy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, as one of the former Soviet countries, has undergone considerable changes and development. Given the conditions inherent to globalization and free-market economy language skills at least in three languages is considered as a guarantee of economic competitiveness. Nowadays in connection with the current language policy and a political directive on trilingualism, three major languages, i.e., Kazakh, Russian and English, are mostly used in the context of Kazakhstani business communication. In accordance with official statistics the use of the state language (Kazakh) in the office-work of the state bodies has increased from 32.7 % (2006) to 96 % (2018), Russian is still very popular in private business institutions, whereas foreign companies use English and Russian in their communication. However, there is still a lack of information on the actual language use in the workplace of other organizations in Kazakhstan rather than state institutions. In this paper the survey questionnaire and a set of semi-structured interviews with Kazakhstani professionals from different types of business organizations (i.e., in the state, private sectors, national and international, etc.) were conducted to identify a real usage of Kazakh, Russian, and English in a variety of business settings, cross-cultural pragmatic failures, challenges and prospects associated with their usage.