Another Step away from Russian Scripts toward a Common Turkic One in Central Asia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 16 – On December 15, Turkic peoples and their friends celebrated the first World Day of Turkic Languages that UNESCO created. In honor of this day, Turkey released two books from Central Asia that have long appeared only in Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet in a common Turkic script based on the Latin one of the West.

            The four Turkic countries of Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – have taken steps to develop and then introduce Latin-based scripts for their national languages which the Soviets insisted from the 1930s on use only Cyrillic ones. But the dream of many in the region and in Turkey is for them to have a common Turkic script.

            Were such a script to be introduced, it would function in much the same way as the Persido-Arabic script did in pre-Soviet times, making it possible for speakers in one country to read and otherwise interact with speakers in another without translation and thus promoting a new union and overcome the narrow nationalisms that arose after Soviet linguistic engineering.

            To demonstrate the possibilities that a common Turkic alphabet offers, Turkey and its allies in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan published two works, Kazakh enlightener Abai Qūnanbaiūly’s Words of Instruction and Kyrgyz novelist Chingiz Aitmatov’s The White Boat in the common Turkic alphabet Ankara has developed.

            While this is a small step, it follows on the heels of Turkey’s decision to refer to Central Asia from now on by its former name Turkistan, “the land of the Turks;” and many Russians are outraged by what this will mean as far as Russia’s influence in the region is concerned, Nezavisimaya Gazeta reports (ng.ru/cis/2025-12-15/1_9401_alphabet.html).

Aleksandr Kobrinsky, the director of the Moscow Agency of Ethno-National Strategy, reflects such concerns when he argues that “it is obvious that the transition to a common Turkic alphabet is intended not only and not so much to simplify communication among Turkic peoples and strengthen cultural cooperation” as to split off Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan from Russia.”