Authors

Discussion

This paper explores how users on Kazakhstani social media platforms negotiate postcolonial subjectivities through everyday linguistic practices, both drawing on and contesting colonial discourse. As Kazakhstan continues to rearticulate its national and cultural identity in the shadow of Soviet and broader imperial legacies, online spaces have emerged as crucial arenas for the (re)construction of selfhood, language ideologies, and sociopolitical positioning.

Using a sociolinguistic ethnographic approach, this study combines critical multimodal discourse analysis (CMDA) and digital ethnography to examine interviews, public posts, and comment threads by Kazakhstani users on Instagram. The theoretical framework integrates postcolonial theory and linguistic nationalism, investigating how Western postcolonial epistemologies are localised, appropriated, or subverted in the Kazakhstani context.

The analysis reveals that decolonial tropes - such as critiques of epistemological colonisation, revisionist historical narratives, and the deconstruction of language - constitute a multilayered, contested, and dynamically evolving phenomenon, marked by strong polarisation in public opinion.

Ultimately, the study argues that Kazakhstani social media functions as a tribune for the ambivalent negotiation of postcolonial identity, where users oscillate between reclaiming indigenous voices and reifying inherited colonial scripts. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on digital postcoloniality, multilingualism, and the shifting contours of subjectivity in late modernity.