Tartarstan

[Grant Barrett]

Interesting article about re-adopting the Latin alphabet over the Cyrillic in Tartarstan.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/14-Oct-1999/stories/story3.html

An extract:

"Until the 20th century, Tatar was written using Arabic script. Before the 1917 revolution, reformers began debating a switch to Latin. Latinization of Tatar was eventually carried out in the 1920s, as it was in other Soviet republics with Turkic languages and in Turkey.

"For the most part the switch from Arabic was an ideological decision aimed at creating a more secular society by distancing the Tatar language from Islam, said Mirfatykh Zakiyev, director of Tatarstan's Institute of Language, Literature and Art.
In 1939, Josef Stalin ordered Tatar, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turkmen, Azerbaijani and other Turkic languages to be written in Cyrillic as part of his Russification policy. Zakiyev said the reform was carried out hastily and the new alphabet was poorly suited to the language.

"Zakiyev said talk of perfecting the Cyrillic alphabet or returning to Arabic was dropped in favor of integration into the 21st-century, computerized global village, where Latin characters are dominant.

"Iskhakov said the change would help "to carve out a cultural field for Tatars separate from Russians" and would bring Tatars closer to other Turkic peoples. "