Kazakhstan Braces For Linguistic Reforms

Earlier this year Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s announced that the Kazakh language will be rewritten using a Latin-based alphabet. This has left some people wondering how the Turkic language, spoken by over 18 million people in the Caspian and Central Asia regions, will have its phonemes and morphemes transliterated from a Cyrillic script that has been used since the 1940s into one resembling English, for example.

“Switching the Kazakh alphabet into a Latin-based alphabet is an historic event for Kazakhstan,” Dosym Satpayev, a political analyst and director of the Almaty-based Risk Assessment Group told Caspian News.

Writing Kazakh in a Latin alphabet is nothing new, however.

Modern Kazakh language is about 1,000 years old, and was written in the Arabic script until 1929, when Soviet authorities introduced a Latin-based alphabet called the Uniform Turkic Alphabet. In 1940, the Soviet Union changed the alphabet used to Cyrillic, which is mainly used and suited for Russian and other Slavic languages.

During the Soviet era “it was forbidden to use Kazakh orthography (writing) or orthoepy (pronunciation) for foreign words, which resulted in an increase in the number of adopted words – writing and spelling of which don’t follow the rules of the Kazakh language,” Anar Fazylzhanova, the deputy director of Kazakhstan’s Akhmet Institute of Linguistics, told Caspian News.

Kazakh linguists have long supported the idea of reforming what is the national language of Kazakhstan and spoken by minority populations in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, to ease its writing and pronunciation, which was reshaped during 70 years of Soviet rule.

“Kazakhstan will see lots of positive changes if we reform our writing on the basis of the Latin alphabet, especially in terms of adaptation of the foreign words to the native language,” Fazylzhanova told Caspian News.

Kazakh vocabulary is full of foreign loan words, and the language has nearly 30 rules and conventions for spelling, in part because of Russian influence.

The new Latin alphabet will avoid the usage of digraphs, such as "sh" and "ch", and diacritics, like "ä" or "ç”. President Nazarbayev has said that a new Kazakh alphabet should contain "no hooks or superfluous dots.” Instead, the new alphabet is likely to use apostrophes to represent Kazakh letters and sounds where there is no direct Latin equivalent, similar to the current Uzbek alphabet.

But not everyone is convinced that a Latin script is the best option.

“To be honest, Cyrillic is more suitable to be reshaped, as it formed later that the Latin alphabet. It has a more innovative structure; more signs for different, specific sounds that can be written in the Cyrillic alphabet,” said Fazylzhanova.

“Both alphabets are originally homogeneous and both of them refer to the Christian world. We could keep Cyrillic and reform it by removing unnecessary letters that are specific to Russian words Kazakhstanis have adopted.”

Nazarbayev’s current attempt to re-write Kazakh comes after numerous attempts to do so in the 1990s, all which were unsuccessful.

A revival of the Orkhon script had been proposed by some linguists. The alphabet looks like Nordic runes to the untrained eye, although the script is that used during the early Turkic khanates, from the 8th to 10th centuries A.D. The idea of reviving the script was not popular with Kazakhstanis and had been dropped.

Another idea was to revive the use of the Arabic script, which was first introduced to Kazakhstan in the 11th century and used to write Kazakh until 1929. But Kazakhstanis, when asked, were not enthusiastic about using it.

The decision to use a Latin alphabet seemed to be the most popular, as demographic shifts have taken place in the Kazakhstan since the founding of the modern state in the early 1990s. Kazakhstanis are more conscious now than ever of a globalized world, where writing systems similar to English and European languages are more appealing, especially to youth.

Writing a Turkic language in a Latin alphabet is not unprecedented, however. In 1928, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk introduced alphabet reform for the Turkish language, which had, up until that point, been written in a modified version of the Arabic script.

Azerbaijani, also a member of the Turkic languages family, has been written in a Latin alphabet since 1991 after the modern state was created from the collapse of the Soviet Union. It, too, had a rough ride from using a modified version of the Arabic script: from 1929 to 1939, a Latin alphabet had been used in Soviet Azerbaijan, and from 1939 to 1991 the Cyrillic script was in use.

While some have suspected that a shift in Kazakhstan away from Cyrillic to Latin is a geopolitical message being sent by Astana to the Kremlin, some experts have been quick to quell the idea.

“Switching the Kazakh alphabet to Latin doesn’t mean Kazakhstanis are changing the relationship with Russia,” Dosym Satpayev said, offering an historic explanation why Kazakhstan did not make the change much sooner after the dissolution of the USSR, like Azerbaijan had.

“Right after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Kazakhstan didn’t turn to the Latin alphabet because the majority of the local population was Russian-speaking,” Satpayev said.

“But the situation has changed now. As many as 60 percent of Kazakhstan’s population are ethnic Kazakhs, and the [desire to] develop the native language is wider and more than it was in the 90s.”