ABC of alphabet reform in Kazakhstan Opinion by Financial Times

The Financial Times has published an opinion piece arguing that moving from Cyrillic-based to modified Latin script will distance the central Asian state symbolically from Russia. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

It took only a few hours after my arrival in Astana, Kazakhstan’s futuristic capital, to appreciate the immense changes since my first visit to the country 36 years ago. Most obviously, Kazakhstan was no longer the drab central Asian outpost of a drab communist empire ruled from Moscow. But what caught my eye most was the young man with one word on his T-shirt: “Qazaqstan.”

How to spell the country’s name, and which alphabet to use for the Kazakh language, are questions of the highest political sensitivity. Cautiously, the government is preparing to replace the Cyrillic-based alphabet used for Kazakh since Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship with a modified Latin alphabet. Some Kazakhs already spell their country’s name as they would like it in Latin script — Qazaqstan.

The new alphabet is still under discussion, and the switch is unlikely to be fully in place until the 2030s. But the symbolism of the reform is clear. The Cyrillic script derives from Russian and is a reminder of Kazakhstan’s long, sometimes horrifically violent history under Soviet rule. The Latin script will place Kazakhstan alongside Western countries, not to mention other Turkic-language states that have adopted that alphabet.

Some Kazakhs would like the reform to proceed faster. Qazaqshajaz (“Write in Kazakh”), an online movement, puts pressure on companies that use only Russian on social networks to post the same content in Kazakh. But the authorities are taking their time. “The use of Kazakh is increasing every year. So there is no reason to worry,” President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said last year.

There are good reasons for the government to handle the matter with care. In a 1989 census, two years before the Soviet Union’s demise, Kazakhs and Russians each accounted for just under 40 per cent of the republic’s population. In a census two years ago, Kazakhs had risen to 70 per cent and Russians had declined to almost 15 per cent.

However just as Moscow claims to be the “protector” of Russian-speakers in Ukraine, so some nationalists in Russia cast greedy eyes over northern Kazakhstan, which borders their country, and are ever on the lookout for discrimination in favour of Kazakh over Russian.

The Kazakh authorities are adamant that they intend no such measures. Indeed, Tokayev has proposed setting up an international body for the promotion of Russian. Plus, although Kazakh is the “state language”, Russian has protected status in the constitution as an official language. Much public administration, schooling and business continues to be conducted in Russian.

In Astana, I heard as much Kazakh spoken as Russian. All the Kazakhs I met were bilingual, and some spoke English as well. It was a different story in 1987, when I visited Alma-Ata (the former capital, now Almaty) and heard not a word of Kazakh. However, behind that trip lies a story — one with much bearing on Kazakh identity today.

In December 1986, anti-Soviet demonstrations erupted in Alma-Ata and other Kazakh towns after the Kremlin replaced an ethnic Kazakh with a Russian as Kazakhstan’s communist party leader. The uprising is now commemorated as a brave protest against Russian colonialism that paved the way for independence in 1991.

The leader who encouraged this version of events was Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s first post-communist head of state from 1991 to 2019. But he told a different tale when I and a few other Moscow-based reporters interviewed him in 1987. At that time, he was Kazakhstan’s prime minister. Nazarbayev denounced the protests as the work of hooligans and drug addicts, and said that only two people had died in the riots. The exact death toll is still unclear. But according to a KGB officer who testified to a subsequent official inquiry, 155 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers were killed.

Of course, barefaced lies were to be expected in communist times. And under Tokayev, the personality cult of Nazarbayev has been dismantled. But as Kazakhstan consolidates its independence, it would be nice to think that integrity in government will be as much part of the fabric of national life as a new alphabet.