Image of the Country in the Linguistic Consciousness of Kazakhstani Youth

The article attempts a psycholinguistic and cognitive-discursive assessment of the perception of the image of Kazakhstan by Kazakhstani youth. The relevance of the research is conditioned by the need to study the value orientation of young people, their ability to preserve national-cultural and personal self-identification in the context of expanding globalization and various internal and external processes taking place in the country. The novelty of the research lies in examining the country`s image through the prism of how the word “Kazakhstan” is perceived and through the analysis of essay texts. The results of the conducted research allowed for determining the attitude of Kazakhstani youth (with a focus on university students in this article) towards their country, assessing its significance in their lives, their readiness to associate their future with it, and to shape the trajectory of their personal and professional development. The data of the associative experiment and textual material in the form of student essays on a given topic are used in the work. During the data analysis process, MAXQDA software was used, which is designed for automated data analysis and provides qualitative, quantitative, and combined results of processed information. The research yielded cognitive models that reflect specific perceptions and evaluations of the country