Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 26—Tatarstan’s
State Council has voted to allow Tatars to write in the Latin script rather
than the Cyrillic-based one when they deal with republic officials, a step that
brings that Middle Volga more closely into line with the broader Turkic world
but that challenges Moscow which has insisted that non-Russians in the country
use Cyrillic.
The Tatarstan parliament approved
the measure “after an emotional discussion, “Nezavisimaya gazeta” reports, by a
vote of 62 to 18 with six abstentions. The
new republic law thus partially restores the 1999 one that Russia’s
Constitutional Court subsequently forced Kazan to repeal (www.ng.ru/regions/2012-12-24/100_graphics.html).
The Kazan Tatars have used four
different alphabets over the past century: the ancient Turkic, Arabic, Latin
(1927 to 1937), and Cyrillic since 1937, but supporters of Latin script have
argued that it will promote national identity, bring Tatarstan in line with
other Turkic states and assist in integrating Tatarstan into the global economy
which relies on Latin script languages.
The Soviet government in the past
and the Russian government now have insisted often over strong objections by
non-Russians on the use of Cyrillic rather than Latin script. That is because
Moscow views this as promoting both Russian language knowledge among the
non-Russians and integrating these peoples into a Russian-dominated cultural
and political milieu.
Artem Prokofyev, a KPRF deputy in
the Tatarstan State Council who opposed the measure, says that some of his
colleagues suggested that the fate of the Tatars depends almost entirely on
changing the alphabet from a Russian one to a Latin script. And they invoke “tradition”
even though Tatar used a Latin script for only ten years.
But Farit Mukhametshin, the speaker
of the Tatarstan State Council, said this issue isn’t going away whatever its
opponents think because “globalization is intensifying and the English language
which uses the Latin script is more and more seving as the language of
inter-national communication in our life.”
It seems likely that many Tatars
feel the way one blogger there does. He recently left a post saying that “if
the Latin script would bring harm to the Tatar language, the Kremlin would
hardly be opposed to its introduction” (forum.tatar.info/index.php?showtopic=2791).
(Tatarstan’s struggle to shift from
Cyrillic to Latin script has been extremely complicated. For a detailed
discussion of this issue, see Fandas Safiullin’s recent series entitled “Orthographic
Imperialism” at zvezdapovolzhya.ru/obshestvo/orfograficheskiy-imperializm-08-11-2012.html, zvezdapovolzhya.ru/obshestvo/orfograficheskiy-imperializm-ch-2-08-11-2012.html, zvezdapovolzhya.ru/obshestvo/orfograficheskiy-imperializm-23-11-2012.html
and zvezdapovolzhya.ru/obshestvo/orfograficheskiy-imperializm-ch-4-13-12-2012.html.)
Meanwhile, there have been some
other related developments on the alphabet and language front. On December 14, Kazakhstan President
Nursultan Nazarbayev announced that his country would make the shift from
Cyrillic script to Latin script by 2025, something for which Astana has already
been planning (www.trend.az/regions/casia/kazakhstan/2099086.html
and www.zonakz.net/articles/?artid=19874
).
As Kazakhstan’s planning document
makes clear, changing alphabets is both difficult and expensive. Moreover,
whatever gains it produces, the shift itself can entail some losses with at
least some people reducing their reading of materials in the new script and
thus limiting the impact of those cultural forms.
But however that may be, Nizami
Jafarov, chairman of Azerbaijan’s Milli Mejlis commiteeon culture, recentl
noted that “the transition to a single Latin script has begun in all Turkic
language countries” and that this process will now accelerate given Kazakhstan’s
influence on the Kyrgyz, Tatars and Bashkirs (news.day.az/society/372727.html).
And in Kyrgyzstan where Russian and
Cyrillic still dominates, Syrtbay Musayev, a writer, has appealed in an article
in “Kyrgyz Tuusu” for the population to pressure Bishkek to ensure that Kyrgyz
speak Kyrgyz,,the state language, and not just Russian, the official one
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