Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 9 – Arguing that
Russian law requiring all languages in the Russian Federation to be written in
Cyrillic both puts a brake on their development and violates the rights of
citizens, the Chuvash Ireklekh organization is calling on their republic
government to shift to the Latin script.
In a letter to the Chuvash republic head
Mikhail Ignatyev, the organization details the ways in which the continued use
of Cyrillic is cutting the people of the republic off from the international
community and making it more difficult for them to engage in research and
public life (turantoday.com/2017/07/chuvashia-latin-alphabet.html).
The Chuvash thus
become the latest Turkic republic in the former Soviet space to make that
demand. Most of the now independent Turkic countries there already have made the
shift or are in the process of doing so, and the Turkic republics within the
Russian Federation, including Tatarstan, have been seeking a similar change.
Chuvashia, a 1.2 million-strong
republic just to the west of Tatarstan, seldom gets the attention others have.
But it may play an even larger role in changing the alphabet regime in Russia
than any of the others. That is because it represents a kind of bridge, its titular
nation being Turkic by ethnicity and Russian Orthodox Christian by religion.
Consequently, this call has the
potential to promote a shift away from Cyrillic to Latin script go beyond the
Turkic world and affect neighboring Finno-Ugric and other nations in the Middle
Volga and perhaps more generally. Russian officials are very much aware of this
danger to their position as they understand it and will actively oppose what
the Chuvash want.
The Ireklekh appeal begins by noting
that arguments for using Latin script rather than Cyrillic have been made for
more than a century and are now being advanced not just by nationalist activists
but also by “leading scholars and linguists of the Chuvash State Institute for
Humanities,” a government institution.
What makes the appeal especially
powerful is that it is less on the national feelings of the Chuvash than on the
current features of the Internet and the difficulties anyone not using Latin
script faces in gaining access to what is becoming the most important channel
for international scholarly communication.
“The English-language origin of the
Internet means that URLs and e-mail addresses are presented in Latin script
letters” or in some cases in non-Latin script but with “the use of letters of
the Latin script” as the underlying element, the appeal says. And it points to
the “technical” difficulties facing anyone who is not using Latin script all
the time.
Cyrillic
keyboards don’t have all the Chuvash letters needed. That not only makes it
more difficult for Chuvash speakers to gain access online, but it also means
that those who want to find Chuvash texts face a far more difficult challenge
in searching for them. This problem is
even more critical in SMS messages because so much space has to be given to the
alphabet issue that little additional information can be conveyed.
What needs to be remembered, the
organization reminds the republic head is that “the Chuvash alphabet on the
basis of the Latin script is already being used in the Chuvash sphere of the Internet
in the establishment of sites, the carrying out of blogs, and in communications
via messengers, and also by German, Hungarian, Finnish and Turkish researchers
of Chuvash.”
But that raises another problem
which going over to Latin script more broadly could solve, Ireklekh says. There is at present no standard Latin script
for Chuvash but rather several, and the government can play a positive role by
promoting a single standard Chuvash Latin script so as to avoid confusions.
And the organization suggests that
at least as a transitional measure, there is no reason why Chuvash in the Latin
script cannot coexist with Chuvash in Cyrillic, something that would allow the
republic to follow both the republic law on languages and the Russian
Federation law on alphabets.
No comments:
Post a Comment