Kazakhstan goes Latin

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Excerpts from "Kazakhstan: Latin Alphabet Is Not a New Phenomenon Among Turkic Nations", by Uli Schamiloglu (a professor in the Department of Kazakh Language and Turkic Studies at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan), EurasiaNet (9/15/17):

Kazakhstan’s planned transition to the Latin alphabet raises complex questions. While alphabets may not be important in and of themselves, they play an important role in helping define a nation’s place in the world.

As a Turkologist, I regularly teach a range of historical Turkic languages using the runiform Turkic alphabet, the Uyghur alphabet, the Arabic alphabet and others. Turkologists also study various Turkic languages written in the Syriac alphabet, the Armenian alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet, the Greek alphabet and others.

Stated briefly, you can use a lot of different alphabets to write Turkic languages. From a technical point of view, it is just a question of how accurately any particular alphabet represents speech sounds.

The classic version of the Arabic alphabet — with additional letters introduced for Persian — does not represent the vowels of Turkic languages accurately. Nevertheless, it was used successfully for Chagatay Turkic in Central Asia and Ottoman Turkish in the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, innovations were introduced to represent vowels more accurately, and this is certainly the case with the reformed Arabic alphabet used currently for Uyghur.

Using the Latin alphabet to represent Turkish languages is not a new phenomenon. The alphabet was used to write the Codex Cumanicus in a dialect of Kipchak Turkic in the early 14th century. More recently, Turkey adopted one version of the Latin alphabet beginning in 1928, as did Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan from 1991, and Uzbekistan in 2001, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We should also recall that in the early Soviet period most of the Turkic languages of the union shared a common Latin alphabet — the so-called Yangälif — beginning in 1926. But this alphabet was soon superseded by individual Cyrillic-based alphabets that were different from each other.

There are several linguistic factors supporting Kazakhstan’s planned switch to the Latin alphabet. One, of course, is that the Latin alphabet is familiar to a far larger number of educated persons than the Cyrillic alphabet. It is also used widely for communication over the internet and cellular telephones.

It is now official policy in Kazakhstan to promote three languages through the educational system — namely Kazakh, Russian and English. I think it is well documented by now that the Russian-speaking space is in decline throughout the former territories of the Soviet Union. But Kazakhstan, like Tatarstan, is so strongly bilingual that I am not worried so much that the use of Russian will decline in Kazakhstan any time soon. The real challenge is to make sure that Kazakh becomes viable as the official language of Kazakhstan.

Unlike in Turkey, or say Uzbekistan, Kazakh has a long way to go before it becomes the default language of choice among citizens of Kazakhstan.

The entire article is fascinating and well worth reading, not just by linguists, but also by political scientists, social scientists, and cultural historians.  The only thing I would add is that the movement toward the adoption of the Latin alphabet among modern Turkic-speaking peoples began in 1928 with its promotion by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), the founder of the Republic of Turkey.

[h.t. Jichang Lulu]



13 Comments

  1. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 10:52 am

    There's an odd quirk of nomenclature where, in English, "Latin alphabet" and "Roman alphabet" are both commonly used to refer to the writing system, but "romanization" (or "romanisation") is overwhelmingly more common than "latinization/latinisation" to describe the transliteration of texts into that script or a changeover of script for a particular language community, with latinization often meaning something entirely different (e.g. a headline about the "Latinization of Miami" is referring to ethnic and cultural shift having nothing to do with script except maybe the occasional tilde). OTOH, it seems that латиниза́ция is commonly used in Russian to describe the sort of change of script that has happened before with changing political winds and is happening again and thus "latinisation" sometimes seems to be used in the specific context of Anglophone discussions of Soviet policy in this regard as almost a loanword/calque.

  2. DaveK said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 1:16 pm

    For what it's worth, I never heard the term "Latin alphabet" until maybe five years ago. "Roman alphabet" does avoid confusion with the language itself.

    By the way, is "Yangalif" derived from "English "?

  3. Mark Liberman said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 1:17 pm

    See "How alphabetic is the nature of molecules", 9/27/2004, and "Birlashdirilmish Yangi Turk Alifbesi", 9/27/2004.

  4. Dan Lufkin said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 1:25 pm

    I recall reading about the Turkish government flooding the Central Asian republics of the former USSR with Turkish typewriters after the breakdown. Looks like the ploy may have worked for Kazakhstan at least. OTOH I have photos of Astana street scenes from a week ago that show the majority of signs in Cyrillic (about 50/50 Kaz and Russian, as far as I could tell), including a Cyrillic transcription of "O'Hara's Irish Bar").

  5. Ian said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 3:23 pm

    — By the way, is "Yangalif" derived from "English "? —

    No, it comes from yang, the Tatar root for the word "new" and alifba, for alphabet. The typical spelling of the original alphabet is Yañalif.

  6. cliff arroyo said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 3:30 pm

    The switch from cyrillic to latin seems to be one of these issues that shows up every few years and gets some press and then disappears. 4 to 5years ago I spoke to a turkic specialist who's spent a fair amount of time in Kazakhstan and he said the issue was dead (this just after another periodic western media flurry)

    Cyrillic seems to work perfectly well for turkic languages, better than arabic and no worse than latin so i'm not sure what the benefit is supposed to be.

    Also the official Turkish government position is that there is a single Turkish/Turkic language….

  7. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 4:08 pm

    On the Latin v. Roman point, I'm now wondering if the title of this post was intended by Prof. Mair to evoke old-time movie titles like 1941's "Blondie Goes Latin" (imdb plot summary begins "Dagwood disguises himself as a drummer in the ship's conga band to sneak aboard a South American cruise ship" . . .) or LP titles like 1959's "Lombardo Goes Latin!" (by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians).

    I don't think there was an equivalent craze in mid-20th-century American showbiz for projects titled "X Goes Cyrillic."

  8. Nicky said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 10:44 pm

    I am native speaker of Kyrgyz, and, though not a linguist, have always been interested in linguistics. So, let me say what are my impressions:

    1) Switch to Latin alphabet is possible, moreover, in 20th Century there were already two Latin alphabets for Kazakh – one was used in 30s in USSR and then there was another for Kazakhs in China. However …

    2) The particular version of Latin alphabet that will be implemented in Kazakhstan most likely would be awful. The draft version of it was already presented in Kazakhstan's parliament: http://www.inform.kz/en/draft-of-new-latin-based-kazakh-alphabet-revealed_a3063712 It is basically a transliteration: ш goes to sh, ж to zh. Moreover, it creates ambiguities – ashana may correspond to both ашана and асхана. I hope it will be corrected, since there was a heavy criticism of that version: http://astanatimes.com/2017/09/draft-latin-based-kazakh-alphabet-presented-in-mazhilis-provokes-heated-public-debate/

    3) It seems that creators of new script wanted to limit everything to standard set of 26 Latin letters, so that's why they use digraphs like zh, ch, or ng. But even there there is no much logic. For example they use C to replace Cyrillic letter Ц. However all words with Ц in Kazakh are Russian borrowings. The Kazakh language itself doesn't need that letter and may use C to represent some other sound, and use digraph TS to represent Ц in foreign borrowings.

    4) One thing I realized upon closely looking at all these debates is that how different Kazakh phonetics from Kyrgyz. Even at present Kyrgyz alphabet is considerably smaller than Kazakh(Kazakh – 42 letters, Kyrgyz – 36). I experimented with creating Latin script for Kyrgyz. By "creative" use of letters(like Q to represent Ч/CH, or C to represent Ж/J), I managed to reduce it to 28 letters – still needed 2 or 3 additional letters.

  9. Andreas Johansson said,

    September 21, 2017 @ 12:26 am

    Cyrillic seems to work perfectly well for turkic languages, better than arabic and no worse than latin so i'm not sure what the benefit is supposed to be.

    To use a globally more common alphabet, and to align with Turkey rather than with Russia.

  10. Andrew Usher said,

    September 21, 2017 @ 7:53 am

    [quote="cliff arroyo"]Also the official Turkish government position is that there is a single Turkish/Turkic language….[/quote]
    Then a single script – the one that Turkey uses – should be adopted for this 'language', right?

  11. Andrew Usher said,

    September 21, 2017 @ 7:56 am

    Guess those quote markers don't work here … (LOL) – I automatically typed them without thinking.

  12. Chris Button said,

    September 21, 2017 @ 12:17 pm

    To explain it in technical terms, front vowels in Russian palatalize the preceding consonant. So it is that you have speakers of these Turkic languages pronouncing words as though they were written in Russian — “spelling pronunciation” as it were. In other words, they pronounce words in their own language with a “Russian accent.”

    From a Chinese perspective, is something like 工 often pronounced closer to /koŋ/ than /kʊŋ/ under the influence of "spelling pronunciation" via pinyin "gong"? Or is this a variation that predates the use of pinyin in Chinese schools?

  13. David Marjanović said,

    October 1, 2017 @ 4:39 pm

    the movement toward the adoption of the Latin alphabet among modern Turkic-speaking peoples began in 1928 with its promotion by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

    No – the Latin alphabet (with specially created additional letters that are all in Unicode now, but are not used for Turkish) was officially introduced for the Turkic languages of the Soviet Union in 1922.

    From a Chinese perspective, is something like 工 often pronounced closer to /koŋ/ than /kʊŋ/ under the influence of "spelling pronunciation" via pinyin "gong"? Or is this a variation that predates the use of pinyin in Chinese schools?

    The sound I've always heard isn't [ʊ]; it may be as close as [ʊ], but it's fully back, not centralized; it lies somewhere between [o] and [u], and may be a tiny bit closer to the former than to the latter.

    Then a single script – the one that Turkey uses – should be adopted for this 'language', right?

    For years, the Tatar Wikipedia was written in what amounts to the Turkish alphabet with additional letters (ä, q, ñ, í) and with w instead of v (because it's pronounced [w] in Tatar). This "Zamanälif" ("modern alphabet") isn't official anywhere and was eventually abandoned. Too bad, it worked very well.

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