Latinization

Why the Latin script

Three aims overlapped in the campaign. The first was literacy: the Arabic script, with its incomplete marking of vowels, was judged hard to learn, and changing the writing system looked like the faster route to abolishing adult illiteracy. The second was secularisation: the Arabic script was the medium of the maktab and of clerical training, so changing it cut the ground from under that school system.

The third was internationalism. Part of the leadership regarded the Latin alphabet as the script of world revolution. Lunacharsky was its best-known advocate, and on his account Lenin also favoured Latinization while opposing any rush to convert Russian itself. A Latin alphabet for Russian was in fact drafted in 1929 but never adopted.

How it proceeded

It began in Azerbaijan and the North Caucasus in 1921, and in 1925 a congress on education among the mountain peoples resolved to Latinize Ingush, Kabardian, Karachay, Adyghe and Chechen. The Baku congress of March 1926 made it an all-Union undertaking, and a decree of 1929 on the new Latin alphabet for the peoples of Arabic script gave it official standing. From 1930 it spread beyond the Turkic languages to other families.

Where a language had no script, one was made. This ran with the language arm of korenizatsiya, and because textbooks, dictionaries and newspapers were produced alongside, it amounted to building a literacy infrastructure rather than merely changing letters.

Why it turned back to Cyrillic

From 1936 the opposite campaign began, and by about 1940 most languages had been moved to Cyrillic. The official reasoning matched that of compulsory Russian: a pupil learning Russian should not have to master two sets of letters.

German, Georgian, Armenian and Yiddish were not Cyrillized, and the last three had not been Latinized either; Polish, Finnish, Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian also kept their scripts. The languages moved, in other words, were largely those without an established script tradition of their own or those that had used Arabic.

Assessments differ. For a people whose script changed twice in twenty years this was a break that put everything printed earlier in their own language out of reach. Against that, the grammars, dictionaries and teacher training produced along the way remained, and became the base on which later national-language schooling rested.