The adaptation of the Latin alphabet by the Turkish language in the beginning of the 20th century was an element of a true cultural revolution that allowed for the creation of a new state in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire – the Republic of Turkey. But what is the purpose of the language reform in Kazakhstan?
Speaker Kazakhstan Parliament Nurlan Nigmatulin called the adaptation of the Latin alphabet “an instrument of the general modernization of the language”. Deputy Director of the Institute of Eurasian Integration Sergey Seliverstov goes even further by announcing the necessity to modernize the conscience of the Kazakh people.
Despite the bizarre sentiment of these statements, they are repeating the logic of the previous large-scale language reform – the switch of the Turkic languages from the Arabic writing to the Latin alphabet. It had been thought of in the USSR but the plan, consistently and successfully, was carried out in Turkey whose authorities, at that particular historic moment, were following the model of the Soviet cultural revolution.
If we are to believe Wikipedia, long before Ataturk’s reforms, some Turkish reformists suggested adapting the Latin alphabet. In 1862, at the time of the early reforms, statesman Munuf Pasa spoke in support of the alphabet reform. In the beginning of the 20th century, the similar suggestions were made by some writers associated with the Young Turks movement. The issue became relevant again in 1923 at the time of the economic congress of the recently created Republic of Turkey. A public discussion on the subject continued for several years. The conservatives and religious opponents were against abandoning the Arabic writing tradition. They argued that, by adapting the Latin alphabet, Turkey would distance itself from the big Islam world and substitute its traditional values for the “alien” ones (including the European values). Alternatively, they suggested using the Arabic alphabet adding to it some letters to represent certain sounds peculiar to the Turkish language. However, the Latinization of most of the languages in the USSR territory gave a big boost to the reforms in Turkey.
The Turkish case is interesting because, in this country, the language reform became an element of the whole modernization project implemented by Mustafa Kemal also known as Ataturk (“Father of the Turks”, or “Great Turk”) with fire and sword. By the way, Ataturk never hid the fact that he wanted to be like Lenin.
The Turkish language reform started on November 1, 1928, after the unanimous Parliamentary vote on the Alphabet Law. It was the beginning of a true cultural revolution. Kemal would personally popularize the Latin alphabet in the country. He even wrote the music for the Alphabet March.
Chalk-boards were placed in all the key “infrastructure points” – banks, post-offices, and police stations. Copy-books were sold in every corner. “Turkey has become one big classroom”, wrote the National Geographic.
Ataturk’s language reform had two components and three causes.
Here are the components – the adaptation of the Latin alphabet and purging the Turkish language of the words of the Arabic and Spanish origin.
As for the causes, the first and the most obvious one was the fact that the Arabic transcription did not convey the Turkish vowels correctly. It was precisely this reason that the Kemalists (Ataturk’s supporters) used arguing in favor of changing the alphabet.
If we are to believe Wikipedia, the Turkish version of the Arabic alphabet had been used for many centuries. It was very appropriate for the Ottoman Turkish language with its many borrowings from the Arabic and the Persian vocabularies. The Arabic language is richly supplied with the consonants but does not have many vowels. In the Turkish language, it is the other way around. The appearance of the telegraph and mass media in the 19th century revealed the limitations of using the Arabic alphabet for conveying the Turkish sounds.
However, the scale of the planned reform did not correlate well with the scale of this problem. Hence, here is the second reason to implement the reform – the political one. Ataturk wanted to distance the country from the Ottoman heritage as much as possible. And the situation was quite favorable at that moment: due to the collapse of the empire and the population exchanges with Greece, Turkey’s cultural space became, de-facto, Turkish (before WWI, the Turks were a minority in the country). So, Ataturk received an opportunity to establish a monopoly on the Turkish territory. As we know, the best monopolies are created by establishing one’s own standards and rules. And this, undoubtedly, played a very important part in the reform.
According to Wikipedia, the Greek-Turkish population exchange happened in 1923. The exchange was involuntary and affected the people from Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. It was a result of Greece’s defeat in the Second Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922 in which Greece lost Smyrna and East Thrace. It foredoomed the Christians living in this territory (Christians amounted to 71% of the Izmir pre-war population) to ruthless massacre on the part of the Turkish military forces and burning down the town. After signing the Lausanne peace agreement and the Convention and Protocol between Greece and Turkey, the population exchanges began. It affected about 2 mln people and was involuntary. It was especially so for the Greeks of Asia Minor and East Thrace. The exchange was obviously uneven – 1.5 mln evicted Christians arrived in Greece to take place of 0.5 mln Muslims who went to Turkey.
The historical studies also show that Ataturk was driven by much more pragmatic forces. First, his task was to eradicate illiteracy (at that point in history, not more than 10% of the Turkish population was literate). A big part of this problem had to do with the inefficiency of the Arabic writing that was clearly at a disadvantage compared to the writing systems of the minorities living in the empire. (It is a known fact that the nationalism in the Balkans was a result of distributing the literature written in the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets in the countries that opposed the Ottoman Empire).
When the empire disintegrated, these groups had found themselves beyond the border of the new state that was facing a threat of losing the system of the everyday life governance of its people. The former empire lost the national minorities – the Greeks, the Armenians, the Slavs whose literacy level was significantly higher. It is these groups of the population that lived in the cities and controlled trade, finance, and city governance.
In some memoirs, they recall how, during the first years of the republic, the Turkish officials would personally be on duty at the railway stations and, when seeing a person in a European attire, they would try to persuade him to become a state employee immediately.
Therefore, for Turkey, the adaptation of the Latin alphabet was not simply a matter of enlightenment but that of the survival of the state born out of the ruins of the empire.
According to Wikipedia, modern Turkey was formed in 1923 as a result of dividing the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in WWI and the national-liberation war of the Turkish people, eliminating of monarchy, and transforming the territory with the Turkish majority into a national state.
Ataturk and his administration solved the task of eradicating illiteracy with great success – by the year 1940, more than 80% of the Turkish population had become literate. The price the state officials had to pay for this success was “purging” the language of all the “beautiful”, polysemantic, and compound words borrowed from the Arabic and Iranian languages.
To estimate the scale of this disaster, historians cite the following hypothetic example. Imagine a reform of the English language that purged all the words with the Latin roots used by the Norman conquerors. If that happened, the English language would have ended up with a set of monosyllabic words with the Germanic roots.
Strictly speaking, such words constitute the biggest part of spoken English. In the written language, however, words of the Latin origin set the style. The Turkish language was denied this possibility by the wave of Ataturk’s hand. The traditional Arabic education style was also destroyed. All the 479 medreses that offered religious education were closed. In 1927, it was banned in schools, everywhere.
Nowadays, the discussions on Ataturk’s language reform are still viable. Moreover, they had even intensified after the government set a course for reviving the spheres of influence in the borders of the former empire. The current Turkish authorities are in need of the linguistic and cultural ties of the Ottoman Empire.
The modern Turkish culture was created as a result of Ataturk’s language reform. And it is evident that Kemal’s decision, dictated by the harsh reality, pursued one clear state goal, that is to form a class of educated professionals in the political, social, financial, and business spheres. To achieve this goal, Kemal was prepared to make some serious sacrifices.
But what kind of goal is guiding the initiative of the Kazakh language reformists is still unclear.
