Although urban marginality has long been recognized as a global literary theme, comparative research on how marginal characters is linguistically constructed in Kazakh urban prose regarding to world literary traditions remains limited. Most existing studies examine marginality within national frameworks or through social typology, leaving the linguistic, narrative mechanisms of urban “othering” in Kazakh literature underexplored. This study aims to identify linguistic choices and narrative strategies used to represent marginal urban characters in Kazakh and selected world literary texts. The research corpus includes post-Soviet Kazakh urban prose by M. Magauin, R. Otarbayev, R. Mukhanova, D. Doszhan, E. Abiken, A. Altai alongside works by F. Dostoevsky, C. Dickens, É. Zola, G. Orwell, A. Camus, K. Hamsun, T. Morrison. These texts were selected for their systematic engagement with urban exclusion, social fragmentation and marginal subjectivity. Methodologically, the study combines discourse-oriented qualitative analysis, pragmatic-semantic coding and narratological approaches. Particular attention is paid to strategies of othering, stance-taking, evaluative language, code-switching and narrative focalization as social exclusion markers and marginal identity. The findings identify three dominant models of urban marginality: (1) moralized marginality, depicting degeneration or deviance; (2) romanticized marginality, portraying artists, intellectual outsiders as existential “others” and (3) politicized marginality, exposing structural violence, post-Soviet or postcolonial inequalities. Kazakh texts highlight Kazakh–Russian code-switching as a key indicator of urban stratification and identity fragmentation, comparable to vernacularization in world literature. The study proposes a comparative typology of linguistic othering and a replicable analytical model, contributing to cross-cultural literary linguistics and urban literary studies.
Moldir Amangazykyzy (Sat,) studied this question.