The written word is so important in everyday life that there can be few more radical acts than forcing an entire nation to learn a new script. Yet that is what happened in Turkey in 1928 when the founder of the modern Turkish nation, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, decreed that the Arabic script, which had been used to write the Turkish language for more than six centuries, would be replaced by the letters of the Latin alphabet.....His motivation lay in events that happened in Europe in the 15th century, at the beginning of the modern age, when society was transformed by the invention of the printing press. Because the shape of the letters of the Latin alphabet made them easier to print than other scripts, printing took off in Europe in a way it did not elsewhere. The resulting explosion in information led to scientific and industrial revolutions that, by the early 20th century, had taken Europe to unprecedented levels of wealth and power, giving European nations the means to dominate the globe.....This link between the Latin alphabet and the rise of western industrial society resulted in leaders in other parts of the world seeing the western script as the key to modernity. Could adopting the Latin alphabet be a shortcut to mass literacy and a modern society? Certainly, by switching from Arabic to Latin letters, it was possible to write Turkish phonetically, making it easier to learn to read and write, and so tackle the disastrously low levels of literacy in the country.....But alongside the practical motivation for the change, Mustafa Kemal also had a political one. Arabic was the script of the Koran, and when he banned the use of the Arabic alphabet, it was an attempt to alter the trajectory of Turkish history away from its Islamic past towards the kind of secular, technological society that was being created in Europe.....Indeed, in the 1920s, the Latin alphabet, with its promise of modernity, was on the march into central Asia, where most of the Islamic states had been absorbed by the expanding Russian Empire. Under the tsars, the languages of the region continued, however, to be written in the Arabic script.....But in 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed, and power was seized by the Communist Party. Its leader, Lenin, was determined to modernise and secularise the new Soviet Union. So, in 1929, the Soviet Union decreed the change to Latin letters in central Asia. But Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, was determined to strengthen Moscow's control and he did so by means of another script reform. In 1940, he replaced the Latin alphabet with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. ....Cyrillic remained the script of central Asia for five decades. But in 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart and central Asian states like Uzbekistan became independent nations. Uzbeks now had a new political identity, and there was no stronger way to signal this change than to change the script yet again.
D2HW Television April, 2024