Russia: no choosing alphabets

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes, Nov. 17, 2004:

RUSSIA: NO CHOOSING ALPHABETS The Constitutional Court ruled against the
semiautonomous republic of Tatarstan, which had been seeking to legitimize
the use of the Latin alphabet to convey the sounds of Tatar, a Turkic
language. Ethnic Russians are outnumbered by Tatars in the Volga River
republic, which switched from the Latin alphabet to Arabic script in 1927
before being forced to adopt Cyrillic letters in 1939 as part of Stalin's
Russification campaign. Tatarstan passed a law in 2000 readopting the
Latin alphabet, but a 2002 federal law called for the nationwide use of
Cyrillic.

Sophia Kishkovsky (NYT)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/international/17briefs.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all