Narrative of Dispute in Kazakh Folklore: Litigation as a Cultural Concept in Oral and Epic Traditions


Aryn Y. Baltabayeva Z. Kassen Y. Suleimenova Z.
December 2025Karadeniz Technical University

NALANS: Journal of Narrative and Language Studies
2025#13Issue 28236 - 249 pp.

This study examines the cultural and pragmatic logic of litigation in Kazakh folklore. It is inseparable from oral performance, ethical authority, and collective memory. The present study demonstrates how litigation reveals that justice was not merely administered but performed through storytelling, speech performance, rhetorical wisdom, and communal praxis. The study reviews examples across genres and shows that Kazakh folklore presents litigation as a narrative mechanism that serves as a signpost for a communicative strategy, a discursive performance, and a linguistic phenomenon. Litigation as a cultural concept is embedded in traditional genres through the activities of the Biy institution. The decline of the Biy institution marked the end of an era, but its narrative echoes still resonate in the folk stories, myths, and moral imagination of Kazakh culture.

Biy Institute , folktale , Kazakh , Litigation , oral tradition

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Abay Kazakh National Pedagogical University, Kazakhstan
National Women’s Teacher Training University, Kazakhstan

Abay Kazakh National Pedagogical University
National Women’s Teacher Training University

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