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Many cross-cultural business interactions quite often constitute a source of cultural misinterpretations and misconceptions. Typically each party uses native strategies to communicate across groups. Different cultures also use their own methods to interpret verbal and non-verbal messages. Therefore, developing a deeper understanding of cross-cultural communicational preferences is critical for any successful international business venture, which stems active research interest in this area. This article, in particular, focuses on a comparative analysis of Kazakh business communication style against different established communication patterns across the globe, e.g. a tendency towards following collective cultural patterns within Kazakh community with resulting implications on the importance of space and privacy, relational and collaborative business inclinations, and intuitive communication style preferences. The article also covers the significance of age and preferences. Finally, cultural roots for preferred communication channels, directness, writing clarity and conciseness in Kazakh business discourse are explained. Often it is the historical development of the community that shapes the mentality, styles of spoken and written communication, as well as methods of interpreting messages from other cultures. These trends are demonstrated on the development of modern Kazakh business discourse preferences and traits. Overall, the article shows that it is not only important to be aware of differences in cultural communication conceptions, but even more important to recognize them, place and interpret the message within the right cultural context. This work aims to present a well-rounded overview of Kazakh business discourse preferences, serving as a guideline for cross-cultural business communication as well as an important contributing piece to the field of intercultural studies.

Kazakh business discourse is a relatively new area for research, and hence many of the cultural preferences are yet to be explored. This paper focuses on measuring Hofstede’s power distance index for Kazakh culture. A novel technique is proposed, where verbal index is calculated from analysis of publically available texts delivered by representatives of different cultures. In particular, we analyzed public speeches delivered by leaders ofNew Zealand,UK,Germany,Australia,USA,Greece,China,India, andKazakhstan. From these texts we derived a verbal index, which closely correlated to Hofstede’s power distance data. As a result, we were able to obtain a power distance index of 58 forKazakhstan, which was previously unavailable in literature. Furthermore, this method can be used as a cheaper alternative to conducting surveys in estimating Hofstede’s power distance indexes for different cultures.Keywords: Power distance, business discourse, language context