Kazakh literature thrived with the policy of free and universal public schooling and nearly 100 percent of Kazakhs became literate for the first time in their history. “It’s not like switching to the Arabic alphabet or Chinese characters,” Erlan Dossov, a 19-year-old university student from Almaty said in an interview. Communists made pastoralist nomads to settle down by confiscating their cattle and forcing them to work at collective farms, and an ensuing famine killed up to 40 percent of ethnic Kazakhs. Even though other Turkic-speaking Soviet republics, regions and ethnic groups suffered greatly during the Soviet era, Kazakhstan was hurt especially badly. After the 1991 Soviet collapse, they constituted less than a half of Kazakhstan’s population, while the rest were Russians or Volga Germans, Koreans, Chechens and other ethnicities deported to Central Asia en masse in the Stalinist era. The other supported languages are: Abkhaz, Adyghe, Armenian (eastern, classical), Armenian (western), Azerbaijani (Azeri), Bashkir, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Carrier, Cherokee, Chuvash, Georgian, Greek, Ingush, Inuktitut, Japanese, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Tamazight, Ukrainian, and Vai. US Presidential Election 2020: Do televised debates matter? Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Friday announced the country's alphabet will gradually switch from Cyrillic to Latin script. “I am horrified by the switch,” Adil, a public school teacher in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s financial capital, said in an interview. There’s no need to change your keyboard layout anymore. “The status of Russian language’s use in Cyrillic will remain unchanged.”. "[Latin] is used by approximately 70 percent of all countries, making it an essential part of communicating across the globe, especially in terms of technology, business, science and education," the ministry said. Nazarbayev rejected the initial version of the Latin alphabet with what he called “hooks or superficial dots”, referring to diacritics and umlauts, typical for Turkish, and instead backed a version with apostrophes. In August 2014, five months after Crimea’s annexation, Russian President Vladimir Putin enraged many Kazakhs by remarking that “Kazakhs never had any statehood”. A new system with diacritics and digraphs was introduced – and “cherry” would be written as “shie”. In 1940, however, along with other Turkic-speaking constituent republics of the Soviet Union, the country was ordered to adopt a version of Cyrillic, which due to incorporating Kazakh-specific hissing syllables and distinct vowels contains 42 … North Korea: Chinese yellow dust could bring Covid-19 into the country, Show people, places and other topics in this story. Younger Uzbeks grew up reading textbooks in Latin script, but most of the publications are still in Cyrillic. by Zaure Batayeva, editors Routledge (2015) Neighbouring Uzbekistan introduced Latin script in 1993, but the reform has not been fully implemented. “The transition will in no way affect the rights of [Kazakh nationals] that speak Russian or other languages,” Nazarbayev said in televised remarks in 2017. "Moreover, after Crimea’s annexation and Russia's turn to very aggressive foreign policy, some Kazakhs started seeing Russia as an ideological rival, not as a partner.”. ". The switch is also seen as an attempt by Kazakhstan to distance itself from Russian influence and promote nationalism. In a couple of days, the hide dries and shrinks either killing the captive or making him lose his memories and turning him into a ‘mankurt’, an obedient zombie slave. Legal notice | But even the staunchest proponents of the switch agree that it is troublesome. On October, 26 2017, the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has passed a decree to make effective the switchover of Khazakh from the Cyrillic script to the Latin alphabet by 2025. The macabre figure from the lore of Central Asian nomads is used by their ex-Soviet descendants as a metaphor to describe those who forgot their mother tongue and culture because of a Soviet upbringing, centred on Russian language and literature. Follow us on Instagram. | Mobile version, use of the Cyrillic script as "political. In 2017, Kazakhstan's then president and long-term leader Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a decree on the switch from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. Croatia accused of physical and sexual assaults against refugees, How Patani-Malay Muslims refuse to be swallowed by Thailand's mainstream, Turkey's school teacher-turned-eco-warrior collects 1200 heirloom seeds, How the UAE's espionage is aimed at destabilising Turkey. The Arabic script is used in parts of China, Iran and Afghanistan. A picture is worth a thousand words. Kazakh, a Turkic language, currently uses a modified Cyrillic alphabet with 42 letters. With the apostrophes widely ridiculed and criticised, and Nazarbayev - who usually tolerates no dissent and increasingly manifests autocratic proclivities - had to back down. A captive man is shackled, his head shaved, and a fresh, bloodied hide from a dead camel’s neck is placed around his head. Three alphabets are used to write the Kazakh language: in the Cyrillic, Latin and Arabic scripts. The industrialised region borders Russia and is dominated by ethnic Russians. Putin’s words followed a statement from nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who said Moscow should seek to “return” northern Kazakhstan to Russia, along the lines of Crimea. (29.03.2017), The four-part documentary Moscow’s Empire shows how the former Soviet nations faced an anarchic decade marked by military conflicts and the search for new national identities and a new self-awareness. Kazakh, a Turkic language, currently uses a modified Cyrillic alphabet with 42 letters. “All of our literature is published in Cyrillic, and the switch will result in a generation cut off from their cultural roots,” said Adil, who taught Kazakh language and literature for 37 years.