View Content #24504

Your InterCom editor has been involved in helping communities create agreed-upon shared writing systems for languages that previously had a strong oral tradition but not a shared tradition of writing. The process is often surprisingly difficult, socially and politically. For this reason we are especially interested in the current coverage of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev's proposed new writing system for Kazakh using a Latin character set. Here are some articles about the proposed system and reactions to it:

Why the change is taking place:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41800186 (BBC)
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-11-09/kazakhstans-switch-cyrillic-latin-about-more-just-alphabets (PRI)
https://thewire.in/199016/kazakhstan-changing-alphabet-heres/ (The Wire)
https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21730917-its-going-take-lot-diacritical-marks-kazakhstan-wants-kazakh-written-latin-not (The Economist)

History of different scripts used to write Kazakh:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets (Wikipedia)

More background on the proposed system and reactions to it:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2018/01/16/rewriting-alphabet-kazakhstan-leader-looks-leave-his-mark/kXaB7dIEksHYaWcrjyb6wN/story.html (Boston Globe)

A chart of the new alphabet: https://astanatimes.com/2017/10/kazakhstan-to-switch-to-latin-alphabet-by-2025/ (Astana Times)