PECULIARITIES OF LANGUAGE CONSCIOUSNESS OF RUSSIAN-SPEAKING KAZAKHSTANIS (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE FREE ASSOCIATIVE EXPERIMENT IN KAZAKHSTAN)

Abstract
The article gives an overview of cultural and language situation in the Republic of Kazakhstan and deals with the results of the free associative experiment conducted by the author in this country. The experiment was held in the Northern, Eastern and Central cities of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The choice of the cities was substantiated by the larger number of Russian-speaking citizens living there. The respondents of the experiment were university students whose average age was 19. The paper reviews the characteristics of the language consciousness of young Russian-speaking Kazakhstanis and the peculiarities of the usage of certain lexical units as associative responses. Some of the identified units refer to the local Kazakhstani and specific Kazakh culture realia. Moreover, some of the responses are given in the Kazakh language or in a form assimilated to Russian. The degree of assimilation of such words differs. Among the frequent responses the author has found the words whose degree of assimilation is so high that these words are now used as completely assimilated borrowings from Kazakh to Russian language in the language consciousness of Russian-speaking Kazakhstanis. The core of the language consciousness of Russian-speaking Kazakhstanis was compared to the models of the cores of the Russian language consciousness (based on the material of Russian associative data bases) and Kazakh language consciousness (based on the material of Kazakh associative dictionaries). This comparison showed that Russian-speaking Kazakhstanis have o lot in common - 7 out of 10 positions - with Russian respondents from Siberian and Far East parts of Russia. Moreover, the position of the first three most frequent responses in the cores of their language consciousness are similar - man, life and home. The Russian-speaking Kazakhstanis have in common 3 out of 10 positions with Kazakh respondents from the South of Kazakhstan. However, there are concepts shared by both Russian and Kazakh, which can be found in all the considered cores; these are: man, life and good.

Keywords: free associative experiment, cultural and language situation, Kazakhstan, the core of
language consciousness, Russian language consciousness, Kazakh language consciousness, Russian language in Kazakhstan