In late October, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a decree to switch the country’s official alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin.
The president’s office said that the government will appoint a national commission to “ensure a gradual transition of the Kazakh alphabet to the Latin-based script until 2025”.
The former Soviet Republic declared independence in 1991. Its state language is Kazakh. However, Russian is widely spoken across its country and its second official language.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin met with Nazarbayev in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in November. The sides “discussed urgent bilateral and international issues.” No doubts Kazakhstan’s transition to Latin alphabet was one of the discussed issues.
According to experts, in the medium term, the Kazakh decision will lead to a decrease of the Russian cultural influence/soft power in the country.
Right now, Russia is in a weak position. Despite the de-facto victory in Syria, and a strong stance in the Middle East, Russia faces a number of internal problems amid the upcoming 2018 Russian presidential election. The ideas of the so-called “Russian World” is significantly descredited by some actions of local authorities in eastern Ukraine (DPR and LPR). The US-led block contributes additional efforts to influence the internal situation in Russia and expands its funding to “opposition” movements. At the same time, Russia faces the steadily increasing pressure from sanctions imposed on it by the US and its allies. The US-Russian diplomatic relations are deteriorating.
All these factors will not allow Russia to react appropriately to the recent Kazakh moves in a way which would lead to defend in an efficient way the interests of the Russian-speaking population of the country and to keep its cultural influence over there.
The article was edited on Nov.14
Weird Kazahkstan would do that…
Infiltration of the US; a very very big mistake for all sides
good move
i see, nursultan nazarbayev reads southfront. some weeks ago i wrote here, that for russia would be good changte cyrillika to latin alphabet.
and look, the kazakh dictator took my advice. vivat solomon! :)))
Solomon,you are the classic zionatoist apologist and propagandist.pity you are not as wise as your namesake.
You are a demented idiot. Please do us all a favor Ukronazi and get off these forums…go away. We don’t want your anti-Russian, pro-Israel agenda. Get a job and do an honest day’s work man ..
Shlomo, calm down. Why are you so mentaly closed?
Solomon,tell us more about your friends flying black ops.
you all are simply jealous :)))
No solomon,just intrigued. It was you who mentioned it a while back.i would love to know more.
more about what?
I told you above.about your friends flying black ops aircraft airforces. You mentioned it about a week ago.
copy here. i sure did not write about friends, and about their participation is black oparations.
i really don know, what about are you talking?
Sol.it was about pilots,aviatiors ,friends of yours,in an airforce that used russian planes and you mentioned black ops or secret behaviour.look through all your posts.
sure, i have still friends, who fly on mig-29.
but i sure did not talk about secret missions/behavior.
sorry, i will not check my answers for 7-10 days interval
Everyone worships the beast?
garga is the beast bird
Chekheh! Shoo!
It’s wise to look at the experience of the countries which did it before going into that direction. Turkey did it and the result was cutting their cultural heritage off of the new generations. Very few are able to read even the headstone of their grandparents and a lot of Turkish literature is not yet converted (or re-written) into their new alphabet, after about a century.
Kurmanji Kurds did that too, and that’s the reason Kurdish literature doesn’t reach them the way it should.
Changing alphabet has it’s benefits but the problems it creates are just too much. There’s a reason why Greeks didn’t do it and southeast Asian nations preserve theirs.
Some idiots in Shah’s era pushed to change Persian alphabet into a “Latin” one, thank god the decision makers then were smart enough not to fall for that. Conversion of Persian classic literature alone would take a millennia (Tajikstan’s alphabet changed into Cyrillic, the same problem exists there after a century).
what heritage? you know nothing about kazakhstan. in the last 100 years this is the 4th change. and yes, already was latin alphabet, ruskie commies turned to cyrilika. pfuj, you commie-friend!
you lier, you have no own alphabet, you use arab letters. forign letters, you, biiiig, bigggoooo persians! :DDDDDDDDDDDDDD latin alphabet is much, much better, then that krix krax aliph, ba, tha, …
Latin alphabet is better for jews. There is more countries to escape to when they have sucked one dry with usury.
Kazakhstan change from cyrillic to latin is further good to Israel.
they also
Well done.all about globalisation.once a country loses its language,alphabet and symbols it is easy prey.
Just look at english- speaking countries. A diet of us movies and music has turned these countries into macdonalds states of america. American in everything but name and passport!
Plain stupid as Iwrit / Ivrit has its own alphabet. In fact the first alphabeths were developed based upon old hebrew and phoenician and found in the Sinia, around 1800 bc
Solomon, why you open your mouth before you think a bit?
Modern Arabic and Persian writing (modern in term of our history, meaning a bit older than 1 millennia) are both derived from Aramaic alphabet (itself developed from Phoenician).
Here’s Pahlavi alphabet used in Iran before Islam, you can compare it by the kind of writing which got common after Islam and they perfectly fit:
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/mpersian.htm
For Arabic alphabet there are two theories, one that believes it came from Syria, the other that says it went from Yemen. In both cases, the date is determined to be around 3rd or 4th century AD and you may look who was dominating those lands then.
I don’t expect you to know everything, just that you don’t make an ass of yourself but clearly that’s too much of expectation from you.
persian writing was in ancient persia. you have arab letters. thats all.
The least you could do was to open the link, but that was too much, wasn’t it?
Bs dont think.
SHLOMO, tell us about Yiddish and hebrew… And forget about others culture, you are a bad soul.
regarding turkish case, the things you are saying are not true. first of all, literacy rate was very low when turkish republic was declared in 1929 and latin alphabet was adopted. Most of the people accross anatolia were already illiterate and most of them learned to write in latin alphabet for the first time in their lives. in a sense, ordinary people living in anatolia had been already cut off from the culture of written language. Latin alphabet on the contrary enabled them to write easier. Moreover, the “culture” you were talking about related with the arabic alphabet was related with “ottoman” turkish, which was being used by limited number of people belonging to aristocracy class. Again, before the republic was declared the people across anatolia had no idea about that “ottoman” turkish which was being written in arabic alphabet. All in all, in turkey, latin alphabet contributed to the development of turkish language spoken by ordinary people, and their literature.
Thank you for your remark. Would you please specify which part is untrue?
I believe the “Ottoman culture which was limited to aristocracy” was Persian, which was totally disconnected from the people. Ottoman Sultans even changed the names of their favourites into Persian names and there are numerous poems by them in Persian. Heck, even when Safavid kings’ letters to Ottomans were in Turkish, Ottomans did it in Persian. So yes, the language of Ottoman aristocracy was completely different with it’s regular people because it wasn’t Turkish.
All of Turkish literature, folklore and publications (from Nasreddin Hoca, Karagoz and Haci Ivaz, to poems of Ziya Pasha, Fikret, ) was written in that script, is it not true?
Literacy were very low all around the world, it was not limited to the Ottoman empire. But every country had literate people which wrote and kept the records, decrees, books and so on. At least Ottoman civil servants were all literate in addition to a large part of it’s military officers, even junior officers, let alone religious clerics and merchants. All written material of Ottoman empire were also written in that script, isn’t it true?
Most of Turks today aren’t able to read anything from that era, is it not true?
Are you sure the increase in literacy wasn’t related to reform in education, by building hundreds of free public schools and also sending girls to these schools? AFAIK, in Ottoman era very few could afford to send their children to proper schools, most learnt in madrasas, where basic reading and writing [of Qur’an] were covered. Establishing all those schools and university and sending all the children to schools was a Herculean task but Ataturk did it anyway.
In addition to changing alphabet, they “standardized” (meaning simplified) Turkish language. You should know that better than me.
Now, how long does it take for Turkish children (regular, not genius) to learn read and write in school?
Another point is contribution of this alphabet in learning foreign (meaning European) languages. I think I’d leave judgment to the people who traveled to Turkey.
(By the way, Aziz Nesin is very popular in Iran, or used to be. I’m not so sure of our own millennial generation. I understand some of his books were forbidden in Turkey, has it changed?)
I agree with all you said. Turkish literacy rose only because of kemalist public schooling, standardisationsimplification and secularisation.
All advances will be lost within a generation or two if current neo -islamist neo-ottoman policies keep going.
I dont disagree with you totally; but i think in a different way. I think it is not necessary for the entire population to read the documents with its original alphabet belonging to an older era. Besides, i dont think republic of turkey is the continuation of ottoman empire. It is a new state built after the dissolution of the empire. Eg. do entire population of bulgaria need to read ottoman scripts in their original form? which is a substantial part of their history also? It is also true for the people residing in anatolia. This job can be done by historians. If somebody is curious about those texts they can simply read the translated versions. Of course increasing literacy cannot be connected ONLY to the alphabet. But i think it contributed a lot. Learning foreign languages is a different story, as Turkish language has totally different grammer, it is expected that turks cannot learn eurapean languages as easily as iranians for example. All in all, i think alphabets are artifical. And there is no limit for going past. E.g. should libyans use phoenican alphabet or should iraqis use cuneiform script? All in all we should accept that latin alphabet is more universial and simple and Turkish language is more effectively written with latin alphabet than the arabic alphabet. So in turkish case i think change of alphabet was very benefitial.
I agree that there’s no need to return to past when the change is already done 100 years ago. Returning to the old alphabet ‘now’ counts as a change, and not for the better.
Ottoman language was based upon old turkic but overlayered with a majority of persian and arabic, using the arabic script and no one outside of court circles could understand one sentence of the language. Luckily Erdogan wants to resurrect the language in Turkeys higher education.
All the better to write gushing testimonials of erdogan the liberator!
Then Kazakhstan can get dollar tips, Fox News and coca-cola like Japan.
Astana is the NWO’s puppet, they will do as they’re told by their masters…
Which means Russia and Putin are full members of the clube.
Another step towards freedom. Another step away from the iron grip of the communist dictator Putin, and his jackbooted Kremlin thugs.