Language Choice and Language Preferences in Professional Discourse (Based on the Texts of Job Advertisements)

The subject of this article is language practice in the context of Kazakhstan’s labor market. The article provides a brief overview of the language policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan having a direct impact on language practice and the process of commodification of the Kazakh language in general. The article presents an analysis of job advertisements to identify the demand for the language in the labor market. It should be noted that the results of the study reflect the current situation (2023 is the period of the experiment). The results were obtained using content analysis and discourse analysis. The experiment led to the conclusion that the Kazakh language has become a valuable skill in the labor market, but at the same time, the greatest part of written business communication is carried out in Russian. The authors see the prospect of research in a longitudinal study of the process of commodification of the Kazakh language in the aspect of marketing linguistics, as well as research into the specific characteristics of the text of advertisements from the perspective of sociolinguistics, linguistic pragmatics, text linguistics, and discourse theory.