Asia | Apostrophes on the march

Kazakhstan wants Kazakh written in Latin, not Cyrillic script

But it’s going to take a lot of diacritical marks

Apostrophe-free but humiliating
|ALMATY

RARELY has the humble apostrophe caused such commotion. Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president, wants the punctuation symbol to play a much bigger part in public life. Ordinary Kazakhs are objecting. Some feel so strongly that they have launched an anti-apostrophe campaign on social media, adorning their Facebook pages with crossed-out apostrophes.

At issue is the apostrophe-peppered alphabet that the government wants to introduce over the next eight years, to replace the current rendering of the Kazakh language in Cyrillic—the alphabet used to write Russian, among other languages. The new script is a modified form of the Latin alphabet, which is used to write not only English but many other languages, including Turkic ones related to Kazakh, such as Turkish.

Officially, the switch is about equipping Kazakhstan for the digital age. (The new script should be easier to type and to render online.) But the change is also to do with decolonisation. Kazakhstan was a part first of the Russian empire and then of the Soviet one, for over 250 years all told. Over that time, Russian administrators promoted the Russian language; Kazakh nearly died out. To this day only 62% of the population speaks Kazakh well, whereas nearly all speak Russian.

In 1940 the Soviet authorities decreed that Kazakh should be written in Cyrillic. (The only indigenous alphabet is a system of ancient runes; Arabic and Latin letters had also been used previously.) But the version of Cyrillic the Soviets adopted was unnecessarily cumbersome, with 42 letters, including several representing sounds that do not occur in Kazakh, such as shch and ts. The new script will have a mere 32 letters: 23 ordinary Latin ones (c, w and x did not make the cut), and nine with apostrophes.

Many Kazakhs support the idea of changing the alphabet, but are irritated by the lack of any formal public consultation and puzzled that the government seems to be reinventing the wheel, rather than adapting the version of the Latin alphabet that Turks use, say. The government floated another version of a Latin script, featuring digraphs (pairings of letters to represent a single sound, such as sh or ch in English), but it was mercilessly lampooned. Delighted critics pointed out that the rendering of the Kazakh word for carrot in that alphabet would have been saebiz, which looks a bit like a transliteration of the Russian for “fuck off”. More substantively, some argued that it would be simpler to represent each distinct sound with a single letter.

In theory, that is what the new alphabet does, with the help of all those apostrophes. But it is far from elegant. Aktau, a hub of the oil industry, will become Aq’tay’. Kazakhstan will become Qazaqstan. It is not clear that the shift will help Kazakh supplant Russian, which remains the lingua franca and retains its protected status, to the relief of the fifth of the population who are ethnically Russian. But it will at least look more distinct.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Apostrophes on the march"

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