The paper’s findings are based on survey research in form of a survey questionnaire and set of semi-structured interviews in companies in Kazakhstan in order to explore how English is important in performing their jobs and to investigate main features, trends and challenges of the use of English in the workplace.
The considerable increase of English as a language of international business communication is observed in the Republic of Kazakhstan, especially, after the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991. This event has brought big changes not only in the political, economic, and social issues in all 15 states of the USSR, which had been united for 70 years, but also in business discourse, indicating a new stage for development of indigenous and foreign languages in business community of newly-independent countries. With the largest economy in the Central Asian region, Kazakhstan has had the opportunity to establish direct contacts with international business partners and to actively attract foreign investments. The recent trend in the last five years is that English is now used as the common corporate language for internal communications with colleagues and top management in some companies in Kazakhstan. The paper’s findings are based on survey research, which was carried out in form of a survey questionnaire and set of semi-structured interviews with 1500 business professionals in 10 national, international and foreign companies in Kazakhstan in order to explore how the English language is important in performing their jobs, to identify the common occasions in which English is frequently used, to investigate main features, trends and challenges of the use of English in the workplace by Kazakhstani business professionals. Although, the main finding of the research is that in general both employers and employees indicate that English is significant for their organizations, there is still a considerable gap between the English skills required and the English language skills that employees have along with cultural pragmatic failures identified. The tension between the necessity to find most progressive solutions to succeeding in contemporary world community and the desire to maintain local languages is of central importance in understanding business discourse in Kazakhstan.
