The letter of the lore

It’s been brewing for a while but it’s now official.  Kazakhstan (an endlessly beautiful country I had the pleasure of visiting for two weeks last summer) is switching from Cyrillic to Latin script.  The ubiquitous president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has decreed it.

There are practical reasons for this.  Current Kazakh Cyrillic has to deal with both Russian and Kazakhstan’s - very different - native language, with its array of glottal plosives and Turkic vowels.  That means a whopping 42 characters.  On a smartphone that doesn’t even leave enough room for the numbers.

But the symbolic reasons are more significant.

It’s invariably the case that choice of script sends some message out about a country’s vision of itself and who it wants to be.  Serbians in the former Yugoslavia learnt the Cyrillic alphabet first, whilst Croatians learnt the Latin version.  Whilst their respective languages are pretty much the same, the scripts they used gave a sense of difference and identity.  This difference is retained to this day.

Turkey’s change from Arabic script to Latin in 1928  not only made learning the language much easier, and increased literacy rates from 10% to 90%,  it also sent important signals, internally and externally,  about national identity and aspirations:  As the republic’s second president, İsmet İnönü put it: ” For us, the big impact and the benefit of alphabet reform was that it eased the way to cultural reform. We inevitably lost our connection with Arabic culture.”

Sejong the Great  introduced Korea’s genius hangul script in the mid-15th Century. He saw that only the most privileged could afford the time to learn thousands of Chinese characters.  “Saddened by this, I have developed 28 new letters… that people may learn these easily and that they be convenient for daily use,” he proclaimed, adding “A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.”  A bit harsh on the slower learners perhaps,  but you can see the democratising instincts at work.

For Kazakhstan, the move to Latin will probably make learning English a little easier.  An English speaking workforce is an important part of Nazarbayev’s vision for the country.  But beyond this, the move symbolises a determination not to be or be seen as Russia’s backyard. In the long term it’s sure to bring about a change in the Qazaqs’ collective perception of themselves and the story they have to tell.  Neighbours have traditionally thought of Qazaqstan as the endless unknown at the far reaches of their own civilisation.  Perhaps this move is emblematic of a people rather more comfortably in the centre of things.