Linguistic Development from the Perspective of International Business in the Republic of Uzbekistan: The Transaction Cost Approach

The Russian language is still a powerful, prestigious, and respectable language in Uzbekistan’s business society, even thirty-five years after independence from the Soviet Union, although it is neither a state/official language nor a statutory language for interethnic communication in the country. This article attempts to examine this contradictory language situation in Uzbekistan and to clearly understand the realities of linguistic development by focusing on the economic rationality of language use and explicitly applying the concept of transaction costs to our discussion. Our findings are summarized as follows: First, not only do individual’s preference and behavior toward the Uzbek and Russian languages, but economic rationalism also operates in a reliable way behind each person’s choice of language, which makes the Russian language a de facto lingua franca because of its historical prevalence and well-established functionality in Uzbek society. Second, under this rational mechanism for language selection, the Russian language works better than the Uzbek language as a common language both for domestic businesses in Uzbekistan and for specific international markets where Russian is a shared business language. At this moment, English is not a lingua franca because, as compared to Russian, it imposes much higher transaction costs on a majority of Uzbek businesspeople and entities. Our empirical research makes both theoretical and practical contributions to language policy studies. We incorporate a key economic concept—transaction costs—into the analytical framework to explore the logical reasoning behind the plausible difficulties in implementing language policy. As for practical implications, we suggest that upgrading the functionality and enlarging the territory of English rather than Uzbek would be a breakthrough for the de-Russification of language in Uzbek business society.

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