Resultativity as a Marker of Nativeness in Kazakh: Evidence from the Homeland and Diaspora

Abstract

This study examines resultativity in Kazakh as a linguistic marker of nativeness by comparing diasporic speakers exposed to the social pressures of dominant languages with speakers in Kazakhstan, where the ongoing revitalization of Kazakh is reshaping its use. Nativeness is conceptualised as a linguistic construct referring to speakers’ command of a salient and typologically distinctive grammatical feature of Kazakh, namely resultative auxiliary verb constructions. As a gradient phenomenon shaped by intergenerational language transmission, nativeness is relevant both to migrant communities and to the multilingual homeland. During the Soviet era, many Kazakh speakers experienced a shift to Russian as their first language, resulting in a broad spectrum of proficiency in Kazakh, including gradual attrition of core grammatical domains. This development makes homeland speakers affected by language shift comparable to diasporic speakers. When adopting this innovative research perspective, we investigate how these divergent sociolinguistic trajectories are reflected in the use of resultative auxiliary verb constructions, a salient and structurally sensitive domain. To address the two multilingual settings—the diaspora and the homeland—we adopt a quantitative, cross-sectional design comparing four groups: L1 Kazakh speakers (n = 32), L1 Russian speakers with L2 Kazakh (n = 30), Russian–Kazakh speakers in Kazakhstan, whose L1 Kazakh was replaced by Russian during socialisation (n = 33), and Kazakh diaspora speakers across different countries (n = 30), the latter constituting the central analytical focus. The results based on a multiple-choice sentence-completion task demonstrate that the use of resultative auxiliary verb constructions reflects varying degrees of nativeness across contexts. In Kazakhstan, L1 Kazakh speakers exhibit the highest stability, while Russian–Kazakh bilinguals display variability consistent with Russian influence yet outperform L2 learners. In the diaspora, speakers show comparatively high stability in resultative marking, pointing to substantial maintenance despite pressure from dominant societal languages. At the same time, subtle variability points to localised contact-induced optionality in specific grammatical contexts rather than widespread restructuring. Overall, the findings identify resultativity as a sensitive diagnostic of language maintenance and change, capturing both revitalization dynamics in the homeland and adaptive processes in diaspora settings.