Comment by adrian_b
7 hours ago
The Latin alphabet and some local alphabets were allowed for some years after the formation of the Soviet Union, but eventually during the thirties Stalin has started the Cyrillisation by force of most of the Soviet republics. Any opponents were deported to forced labor in Siberia or killed.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most of the former non-Slavic members have abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet previously forced upon them.
They're just 3 states, and they have 0 texts from pre-Cyrillic period in the Latin alphabets they came up with.
Azeri language is similar to Turkish, it's an easy job, and they can watch Turkish media with no issues, and there's an infinite corpus of Turkish texts for them.
For Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan the situation is that they used Arabic script before the Soviet times. There are no texts in the Latin they chose, and their scripts and languages are far from Turkish.
If you walk down the street in Tashkent, there are signs and even announcements in Cyrillic, even in public schools. It takes long to take off, and it's probably 2nd if not 3rd version of Latin.
And also, they teach Russian in Uzbekistan too, and watch Russian media, and share political views. You must have good imagination to suggest that the switch to Latin de-colonized them.
In Kazakhstan, Latin was pet project of the former president, and is currently abandoned.
I wonder, what's your take on your alternative scripts. Latin was enforced by Roman catholic church. Poor Germanic peoples! Muslims enforced their Arabic abjad on Indo-European Farsi, where abjad doesn't quite fit.
All these alternatives have a history of bloody colonialism. Any better options?