SIL in Eurasia

A New Kazakh Alphabet

by Robby Ker

In February 2018 Kazakhstan began to implement its president’s decision to change from the Cyrillic to the Roman script for the Kazakh language. A new Roman alphabet was announced in October 2017, but it produced such a public outcry that a revised version was launched just five months later.

Nursultan Nazarbayev has been Kazakhstan’s only president since the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet his leadership generally receives the approval of his people. The people seem content, overall, and the decision to change to a Roman alphabet was met with approval. That is, except for the apparently gratuitous amount of apostrophes Nazarbayev proposed for the Latin alphabet.

It’s quite enlightening to read the feedback about the eyesore of excessive apostrophes: “In a country where almost nobody challenges the president publicly, Mr. Nazarbayev has found his policy on apostrophes assailed from all sides.” (Higgins, 2018) This seems like a big deal. Language is so crucial to national identity, that the people don’t want an alphabet that’s exhausting to read, even if that means going against the president.

From Cyrillic to Roman

Kazakhstan would not be the first Central Asian country to change from Cyrillic script to Roman. Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan all eventually received Cyrillic script alphabets during Soviet rule, and began changing over to Roman script after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991: Azerbaijan in 1992, Turkmenistan in 1993 and Uzbekistan began in 1993. Kazakhstan arguably has an even more complicated relationship with Russian, however, than the rest of Central Asia. They want a Roman script to distance themselves from Russian identity, but there are still many ethnic Russians living in the country, who simultaneously maintain their identity as ethnic Russians but also have no desire to leave Kazakhstan and move to Russia.

Although not terribly surprising that the country itself would want to use a change of script as a symbol of distancing itself from further Russian influence, it may be surprising that the initiative is being fronted by Nazarbayev, who led the Communist Party in Kazakhstan when it was still part of the Soviet Union. He clearly doesn’t have bad blood with Kazakhstan’s larger neighbor: “[Nazarbayev] has managed to keep a resurgent Russia at bay and navigate the treacherous geopolitical waters around Moscow, Beijing and Washington, keeping on good terms with all three capitals,” writes Andrew Higgins (2018) in the New York Times.

The distance from Russia with the abandonment of the Cyrillic script is therefore not necessarily out of spite, but it is easy to think that the adoption of Roman script would mean looking more to the West. This doesn’t seem to be quite the case either, but rather from a lack of better options.

Kazakh and Mongolian

Kazakh culture is in many ways influenced by early Mongolian culture. Like Mongols, distant relatives, Kazakhs were nomadic horsemen who traveled in clans, and fought their battles primarily on horseback. Unlike the Mongols, however, they did not have a written language. (Mongolian once had an alphabet written vertically, and right to left, but then also adopted the Cyrillic script in 1941 when the country was within the Soviet political sphere.)

Like many tribal cultures, Kazakh culture revolved around oral tradition. It wasn’t until Czarist Russian occupation in the 19th century that Kazakhs began writing things down, in the newly adopted Cyrillic script. The Cyrillic script that was used was modified by the addition of a number of characters not found in Russian Cyrillic. The new Roman script likewise requires modifications, but it is this that has caused the apostrophe controversy: the purpose of the apostrophes is to help represent sounds for which there is no corresponding symbol in the Roman alphabet.

Umlauts or apostrophes?

Linguistically, apostrophes are not the most practical approach to romanizing the written language: “Linguists, who had recommended that the new writing system follow the example of Turkish, which uses umlauts and other phonetic markers instead of apostrophes, protested that the president’s approach would be ugly and imprecise.” (Higgins, 2018) This is particularly interesting if one knows of the linguistic history of Turkish during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey.

The Republic’s first leader, and founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, chose to change written Turkish from the traditional Arabic script associated with Islam, to a Roman script that would seem more secular. He very openly wanted to romanize Turkish in order to help Turkey become more Western. To Ataturk, the West was the future, and the Empire was the past.

Phonetics and phonemics

The first chart below shows the alphabet as proposed in October 2017. The problematic sounds represented by a letter plus apostrophe are shown in red. The second chart shows the February 2018 revised version that is now being implemented. The apostrophes have been replaced by diacritics (that is, an accent above the letter) and digraphs (where two letters combine to represent one sound).

 

 

 

While letter no.1 (A a) is ‘a’ as in apostrophe, letter no.2 (Á á) is ‘a’ as in apple. Note that these comparisons like all that follow, depend on which dialect of English you speak! Letter no.8 (Ǵ ǵ) comes from further back in the throat than letter no.7. Letter no.17 (Ń ń) is like the English ‘ng’, as in sing, while letter no.19 (Ó ó) is rather like the vowel sound in the English bird or heard (but note that the English sounds in these words are long, while the Kazakh ó is short). Letter no.26 (Ú ú) is like the German ü (for example, über) while letter no.29 (Ý ý) is reminiscent of the sound in the English cool or tool. The digraphs ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ are the same as in English.

It must give a lot of national pride to have a new, unique orthography, but such an orthography should not cause more confusion than pride to the people. Adjustments were made so that the Kazakh people can use their orthography with dignity and pride.

 

References

Altynsarina, Elya, “Kazakhstan adopts new version of Latin-based Kazakh alphabetThe Astana Times, 26 February 2018 (Accessed 7 May 2018)

Chen, Dene-Hern, “The Economics of ChangeBBC, 25 April 2018 (Accessed 7 May 2018)

Higgins, Andrew.  “Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes”  The

New York Times, 15 Jan. 2018.  (Accessed 17 Jan. 2018.)

 

Photo

 A Kazakh girl performs at a cultural festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan, by Tore Khan, Flickr.

 

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