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This paper discusses the symbolic capital found within Islamic documents that were circulated in the UK during the COVID-19 outbreak. Specifically, the work explores “fatwas” and “other” similar documents as well as “guidance” documents (referred to as FOGs) that were circulated in March–April 2020 on the internet and social media platforms for British Muslim consumption. We confine our materials to FOGs produced only in English. Our study takes its cue from the notion that the existence of a variety of documents created a sense of foggy ambiguity for British Muslims in matters of religious practise. From a linguistic angle, the study seeks to identify (a) the underlying reasons behind the titling of the documents; and (b) the construction of discourses in the documents. Our corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (CA-CDA) found noticeable patterns that hold symbolic capital in the fatwa register. We also found that producers of “other” documents imitate the fatwa register in an attempt to strengthen their documents’ symbolic capital. Accordingly, fatwas act as the most authoritative documents in religious matters and are written by senior religious representatives of the Muslim community, whereas guidance documents were found to be most authoritative in health matters. The findings raise questions regarding the manner in which religious instruction may be disseminated in emergency situations. Based on this study, a call for the standardisation and unification of these diverse and sometimes contradicting religious publications may be worth considering.

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The paper deals with a specific multilingual situation in Kazakhstan and its influence on youth communication.Youth discourse vividly illustrates current cultural and linguistic degree of modern society, and it helps to predict its future development and direction. A lot of modern new slang, jargons, hybrid words and other youngsters' linguistic inventions in speech have become a usual tendency of standard language as well, as they have been steadily fixed as normal. The same principle is obvious about language interference and code switching which takes place in a bilingual communication environment. The current work presents a part of the overall research of youth interaction in a multicultural language situation. And in the framework of this paper we argue that Internet language can be a serious illustration of the way the youth language penetrate into the standard one including media, politics, everyday adults' speech. In order to demonstrate the issue, we present a thorough discourse analysis of the language materials of YouTube channel as a resource of youth code-switching and interference. The investigation involves popular youth channels including video clips, comedy shows and movie trailers. The analysis has shown a strong mixture of Kazakh, Russian and active inclusion of English as a language of prestige and high social status. We also display language inclusions which were historically borrowed from Russian by youth, and have become an inseparable part of modern national language. The matter of Russian influenced by Kazakh is an interesting object of scrutiny as well, as current state of everyday Russian in Kazakhstan differs significantly from that of Russia.

Kazakhstan’s decision to transition its Kazakh language from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet has serious implications for language policy, communication, education, inclusion, and social cohesion. This critical qualitative study, underpinned by a discourse-historical approach, employs critical discourse analysis to analyze statements of ex-President Nursultan Nazarbayev and semi-structured interviews with Kazakh language educators and social media articles to determine the nature and effects of the Latinization of Kazakh on social cohesion, inclusion, and inclusive education. The findings indicate that Latinization of Kazakh is gradually becoming more ethnically oriented, implying that the inevitable formation of included and excluded language groups. These patterns in society might undermine social cohesion and inclusion, hinder their maintenance and hamper efforts to achieve inclusive education, which prioritizes equality for all social groups through proper access to knowledge.