Kazakhs Eyeing the Latin Alphabet

Last week, EurasiaNet reported that Kazakhstan is officially investigating the cost of switching from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. The openness with which this question is being addressed tells us much about global culture, decolonization, Russian influence in its "near abroad," and international political economy.

While there have long been advocates amongst the Kazakhs for a change to the Latin alphabet, it only recently that the country's powerful nigh omnipotent president Nursultan Nazarbayev has officially back such a move. The change would lead to the use of two alphabets in the country where Russian-speakers still outnumber those whose primary language is the Turkic tongue Kazakh. The Azeris, Uzbeks, and Turkmen--all Turkic cousins of the Kazakhs--rapidly adopted the Roman alphabet after independence from the Soviet Union. However, the Kazakh government was reticent to do so. On the one hand, remaining within the Cyrillic orthographic space aided relations with its neighbor to the north (Russia). The neutrality-loving Turkmen, the Americanophile Azerbaijani, and the anti-Yeltsinite Uzbek governments all happily distanced themselves from the Russian linguistic, cultural, and political space in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991. Language politics was simply a cultural extension of a larger set of policies. We saw this boldly underscored as Uzbekistan's paranoid president Islam Karimov backed a return to Russian-language education after being cold-shouldered by the Americans in the wake of his bloody crackdown on political protest in Andijon a couple of years ago.

Closer to home, keeping Cyrillic enabled Russophones (Russian, Ukrainian, German, Uzbek, Chechens, Koreans, Uyghurs, and others) to more easily adapt to the new "state language," i.e., Kazakh. Keeping a lid on the brain drain of Russian technocrats, educators, scientists, and businesspeople was a major factor in preserving both Russian's role a "language of inter-ethnic communication" and a Cyrillicized form of Kazakh. After a decade of Russian emigration, the trend has stopped. Many Russian emigrants from Kazakhstan have actually decided to return to the country realizing they have better opportunities as a "national minority" (although they loathe this term) under the Kazakhs than as an "immigrant" in Russia (where they are treated no better than other economic migrants from the old southern tier of the Soviet Union.

This is not the first time an alphabet change has been influenced by international politics. Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) literally outlawed the adapted Arabic script that Ottoman Turkish had long employed. While it took a generation of surreptitious Arabic scribblers to die off for his vision to be fulfilled, the decision to embrace the Roman alphabet proved seminal. Turkey started a slow gravitational shift towards the Latin world, and now sits on the doorway of Europe (both physically, legally, and mentally). Within Soviet space, script choices have long been shaping politics. After the Bolshevik revolution, many of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia were forced to adopt a Latin script (and abandon their Arabic writing systems), but fearing the spread of pan-Turkism from Anatolia, Stalin quickly ordered these language to adopt Cyrillic creating a generation of schizophrenic writers and readers. The Baltic states--Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--existed outside this orthographic madness. After their incorporation into the USSR after WWII, the Balts preserved their alphabets which made learning other European languages much easier. The Belorussians, Ukrainians, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz (along with the Kazakhs and others) were locked into a Cyrillic-informed (and policed) mindset which was a subset of the Soviet world (with the exception of anti-Soviet Yugoslavia, albeit still a communist country).

In today's globalized world, the Kazakhs along with Russian Kazakhstanis (i.e., ethnic Russian citizens of Kazakhstan) are extremely cognizant of the power of the Internet, the English language, and neo-liberal norms of international business. Crafting a a Latinized form of Kazakh will undoubtedly add to the Kazakh people ability to better interface with the outside world, but especially in developing their nation into a vibrant information economy (buoyed by wisely invested petro-dollars). Kazakhs are enthusiastic about their nation resuming an important place in the global chain of commerce. A "new" Silk Road is indeed possible, but it will take openness and engagement on the part of the Kazakhstanis (Kazakh, Russian, and others) to accomplish this. The Latin alphabet is part of this transition. And unlike the Cyrillic, it lacks the overtones of imperialism which characterize the usage of so many writing systems around the globe, simply because the Kazakhs are choosing it of their own free will. [Note: The Kazakhs have no deeply emotional ties to their current script--it is a slightly altered version of the Russian alphabet which ill-fits the manifold Turkic vowels of Kazakhs. Prior to the adoption of a Cyrillicized standard Kazakh written language, Kazakh educated elites worked in the Russian, Persian, or Arabic languages. This makes any change much easier to swallow.]

Now to the bigger picture. Both Russia and Kazakhstan see their state coffers filling up with oil money. This enables Almaty to easily bankroll the expensive switch to Latin lettering, while simultaneously endowing Russia with the confidence to bid farewell to Kazakhstan as a Cyrillic-only space (besides, the Kazakh elite continue speaking Russian at home even if they ponitificate in Kazakh in public while their kids watch Russian MTV and read Russian glossy lad's mags or fashion rags). A few years ago, the Kremlin might have balked at such a move taking it as a sign of Western intrusion, but today Putin no longer worries about American meddling in his backyard. Washington is so distracted by Iraq that the country cannot even manage affairs in its own backyard, i.e., Latin America.

To the Kazakhs, I say "Welcome." To the Russians, I say "We'll see you in about 25 years."