Bibarys Seitak Final Draft
INTRODUCTION
The 1920s-30s, as it will be later described in more detail, were the times of important political and ideological changes in Kazakhstan. These changes were reflected in the dynamics of official party rhetoric on different issues, the political landscape of Kazakhstan cleansed from the “enemies of the people” and changing policies. Kazakh orthography based on Latin script that was used from 1929 to 1940 was also undergoing notable changes and reforms: the newspapers from the early 1930s and the late 1930s have quite notable differences in spelling. This decade witnessed particularly important changes in the nationalities policies of the Soviet Union, which are often interpreted and summarized as a shift from indigenization, affirmative action, and regional recognition to consolidation as a Soviet nation and Russification.
This thesis intends to answer such questions as how, if ever, did the changes in the orthography of Kazakh in 1929-1940 reflect the political changes in
Kazakhstan? Who were the main actors that were proposing and promoting changes to Kazakh orthography and who were their opponents? What political backgrounds, if ever, affected their actions in terms of spelling policies? What kinds of arguments were used?
I hypothesize that the changes in the orthography reflect the shift from indigenization to Russification and that the changes in Kazakh orthography in the 1930s resulted in Kazakh (as well as many other languages) corresponded to the phonological rules of two languages, Kazakh and Russian.
Although these topics are related, the particular focus of this thesis is not the issue of alphabet change per se, but the changes in the Kazakh orthography within one writing system — Latin-based Yanalif used in a particular time period.
In the paradigm of modernization, Kazakh orthography was, in general, subject to grand reforms in the first half of the 20th century. First, it reformed its Arabic- based script to fit the needs of its phonology in the 1910s-20s, as declared by the initiators of these reforms. Then, in the late 1920s, the Latin-based alphabet
common for numerous Turkic and non-Turkic “Soviet East” languages called Yanalif was adopted. Lastly, it switched to the Cyrillic script in 1940. What seems interesting is that within Yanalif, there were several visible orthographic reforms implemented as well. Borrowings from Russian changed in their spelling after some time, and certain phonemes changed their corresponding symbols. This seems interesting because even these minute details might as well be illustrative of a bigger picture, that is, of changes of the political and ideological compass in the Soviet Union.
Terry Martin argues that symbolic politics were an essential part of the Soviet policies during Stalin, and that is why he considers the Latinization campaign an important chapter in understanding the nationalities policies of the Soviet Union (2001, 182–184). I take Martin’s argument further and analyze the symbolic politics conveyed by changes within the Latin-based orthography of Kazakh within 11 years of its usage.
The script changes and orthographic changes of the 1920s-30s were, indeed, happening in times of political and ideological turmoil in Kazakhstan, where a new Soviet autonomous republic (after 1936 — simply “republic”) was being established and a communist and Marxist-Leninist ideology was being proclaimed as the new
world order to be built. It was the time when national movements, such as Alash in Kazakhstan or Jadidism in Uzbekistan, or the rise of pan-Turkism were largely inactive and co-opted by the Soviet government, but still influential the existing discourses. Meanwhile, due to various political, historical, and perhaps practical reasons, Russian culture and language were being acclaimed as the catalysts of progress, civilization, and enlightenment. In the context of the establishment of a communist state with Moscow as its center, it would be logical to associate the switch from the Arabic alphabet or Arabic-based alphabet to the Latin alphabet and then also to the Cyrillic alphabet with ideological intentions.
However, it would also be unfair to summarize the approximately 30-year long period of the history of the written Kazakh language undergoing scrutiny and
revisions as a story of abandoning the Muslim nomadic feudalistic order of life and turning it into a product of homo Sovieticus ideations. It is important to analyze the discussions, debates, proposals, and rhetoric of the time and highlight the main ideological clashes and affiliations.
This thesis will, first, describe and frame language ideologies in the context of writing systems and orthographies to familiarize the reader with the concept of language ideologies. Second, it intends to outline the historical background behind Kazakh Yanalif that also reveals important factors that affected the course of history and the emergence of certain discourses around Kazakh orthography. The insights into the specifics of debates around the spelling reforms in the 1930s in Kazakh might help us analyze the present reform proposals in Kazakhstan from the perspective of political ideologies and inclinations informing and conditioning the views. Many of the rules in Kazakh orthographies of the 1920s-30s in the Latin script trace their roots to earlier conventions. Third, the thesis will analyze rule books,
documents, and biographies relevant to the discussion to find the main discourses and their possible connections to ideological inclinations.
ORTHOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES
Graphemics is per se an underresearched field of linguistics, and in Central Asia, as a region often paradoxically disregarded as peripheral, the written tradition seems to be especially overlooked in the English-speaking academia.
In the context of Central Asia in the early Soviet period, literacy was one of the key aspects of language reforms and standardization campaigns. First, in the late XIX and early XX century, the writing tradition was established and used mostly by the “intelligentsia”. Later, in Central Asia, print capitalism was on the rise since the beginning of the XX century, and there were several political and social newspapers and magazines, such as Qazaq, Aiqap, Ushqyn, etc. Poems, short stories, and novels were published by Kazakh authors in the vernacular Kazak. However, the writing system they used was Chaghatai or Turki, which was seen by Kazakh
nationalists of the early XX century as defective in the sense that vowels were often ignored (as it is typical of Arabic-based writing systems) or that allomorphs of many suffixes that usually assimilate in certain environments in Kazakh were ignored and only one variant was written, which seemed crucial to the typical Turkic phonology.
The purpose of writing per se was probably different and it was mainly intended for certain privileged audiences rather than “the masses”. The idea of “literacy” per se was often politicized and utilized to distinguish certain social categories (Coulmas 2008, 226, Rogers 2011, 7), and that was also one of the discourses propagated during the years of the establishment of the Soviet Union.
However, besides “practical” reasons, there often are political or ideological reasons why certain groups promote the idea of a certain writing system or graphics.
The fact that the Cyrillic script, for instance, was advocated for partially because “it
contained more letters than the Roman alphabet” (Daniels and Bright 1996, 781), which was obviously false because many different languages that use Latin can add additional diacritics into their alphabets to fit the needs of the phonology of the language and so far, no any “deficiencies” of such actions were proven, and thus it prompts us to assume that most “practical” reasons were simply a cover for
ideological motivations. Moreover, the writing system itself is often the product and the producer of ideologies, divisions, and identities (Coulmas 2008, 231–232). For instance, it is generally assumed that the Arabic-based scripts previously used by Muslim Turkic societies in Central Asia were especially criticized and rejected by many mostly due to their association with the Islamic world and Islamic traditions that apparently did not serve well the new image of the atheist communist world order in the 1920s (Cruttenden 2021, 62).
Language ideologies are almost always intertwined with language planning practices which, in turn, often imply or at least involve orthographic reforms (Sebba 2012, 2; Wertheim 2012, 65). Sometimes these ideologies are explicitly discussed, but more often they are “masked” by discussions of “technical” aspects of linguistic characteristics. However, different actors ’preferences or disapproval of even a minute change to spelling might reveal certain political and social biases.
Purism, standardization, erasure of certain linguistic identities, and writing systems can be listed as classical examples of practices deeply intertwined with language ideologies. However, sometimes even a choice of literature that is to be translated or adapted might reveal ideological inclinations. For example, in the first decades of the Turkish Republic, one of the peculiarities was the decision to
translate the French Le Petit Larousse to Turkish, which exposed the predilections of
the Turkish intelligentsia to put French on a pedestal and consider Turkish inferior in contrast to the so-called “European” languages (Aytürk 2008, 284).
This is not necessarily limited to historical contexts engulfed in political and social revolutions. It was well observed and thoroughly researched in a very recent example of German orthographic reforms of 1996 (Johnson 2005). The German orthographic reforms sparked heated debate in society and caused numerous protests, petitions, and even legal proceedings. It is fair that the mere fact that spelling reforms can prompt people to take such actions leads us to questions of what extent changes in spelling are perceived to be about the communicational functionality of language and to what extent it is rather about identity: political, national, historical, that is being at stake, that is being presumably "attacked” by reforms. Johnson reveals how both the proponents and critics of the orthographic reforms had political and ideological motives in arguing in favor or against certain changes in spelling (9).
Although language standardization always involves these ideological and political aspects, the logic and causal relationship here should not be confused. It is not the standardization per se that creates the hegemonies, hierarchies, prejudices, and advantages for some speakers and disadvantages for others, but rather it is part of these phenomena that all precede the standardization itself. That is, the speakers of languages make linguistic judgments full of embedded hierarchies even without standardization or language planning practices (in their modern senses), the latter simply take it to another level, and extend it to another setting. In other words, these ideologies are not necessarily a phenomenon concerning government or other traditional supervising, policymaking, administrative, or normative entities, such as institutes, schools, and dictionaries. Ideologies are also what “common people”
construct, produce and reproduce in their daily lives. They also establish and strengthen ideologies, for instance, by simply “normalizing” them, that is, when ideologies become the “normal” ways of thinking, acting, and, as in our case, spelling. Also, people can oppose competing ideologies by criticizing, ignoring, protesting them. In many of these discussions, however, orthography per se, its technical details, and linguistic characteristics of the language are what constitutes the center of public debates and controversy, rather than the discussion of identities and ideologies. Therefore, it is important to analyze how exactly ideologies and political biases can be disguised in “linguistic”, “scholarly”, and “expert” debates about orthography (9).
The recent orthographic changes in German provide a well-researched example of how minute changes to orthography can be rooted in ideologies. An aspect where the case of German discussed by Johnson “rhymes”, to an extent, with what this thesis is dealing with in Kazakh is this: the Latin alphabet, being initially created for Latin and the phonology of Latin in particular, was apparently deemed to be “not entirely suited to the task of representing the speech sounds of a Germanic language”. This seems to be a recurring trope in all the discussions of German spelling reforms for centuries (18). This is similar to how Arabic-based script and the differences between morphological characteristics of Arabic and Turkic languages are very often emphasized in the context of Kazakh and the unsuitability of the Arabic-based writing system to represent the Kazakh language.
Moreover, mentalistic, pedagogical, and psycholinguistic aspects of the spelling reform would accompany the ideological movement in both cases, however, “the complainants ’concerns were by no means as politically disinterested as might appear in view of their apparent emphasis” on the abovementioned facets (141).
Fishman argues that “[e]very one of the system-building or revising triumphs of language planning has been carefully cloaked in sentiment, has appealed to
authenticity rationales, [and] has claimed indigenousness” (1974, 23). Being “neat and trim and handy” is not enough for the users of the writing system, he claims, the language and its spelling also need to be “theirs” and the fact that it belongs to them must be seen, must be visible, in other words, the language and its visual
characteristics must be “like” the people that make cultural, historical, hereditary claims on the language, it must represent their history and identities. However, this demand seems internally flexible as well, as it may depend on what and how the elite, for instance, defines their identity. What we can agree upon is that in any case, the reasons for certain rationales to be persuasive, to “make sense”, and social reasons seem to play a bigger role than linguistic aspects of the question (23).
On the other hand, Aytürk (2010, 129) compares the script change reforms in Turkish and Hebrew, highlighting the complex interplay of different variables that determine the outcome of such reforms. While political and ideological factors certainly play a role, other factors such as literacy rates and attachment to cultural traditions can also be significant. However, the case of the Hebrew script
demonstrates that while these other factors may be important, political and
ideological reasons still have a more significant role or final say in the outcome of a script change reform, if we take into the consideration the example of the decision to adopt the Cyrillic script for Kazakh in 1940, despite relatively high literacy rates among the population in 19391.
1 71,2% for men and 51,5% for women, which is significantly higher than the percentage of the literate in pre-Latinization Turkey (Aytürk 2010, 115)
Kazakh seems to be providing an appropriate case to study in the case of the dialectic between modernization and indigenization processes in promoting and enforcing nationalist ideologies that could be seen in language planning and the discussions around it mentioned by Fishman:
“Ferguson (1968) has stressed the intertranslatability goal as basic to language modernization and "development". In this connection both codification and elaboration are guided so as to attain the ease and precision assumed already to exist in one or another Language of Wider Communication. At the same time, however, anti-modelling must also be recognized, particularly in ausbau codes relative to each other or in anti-Western or anti-imperialist/colonialist junctures” (Ferguson 1968 cited in Fishman 1971, 16).
The importance of social factors influencing individuals making judgments about writing systems is also noted in more recent studies:
“In practice, the choice of script is one that is usually made by tradition, by governments, or by the language users collectively (see Eira 1998 and Unseth 2005 for insights into script selection).
Even where digraphia (the simultaneous use of two or more scripts) exists in theory, as in Tatarstan at the moment, the individual language user rarely has a free choice of which to use. Where true digraphia does exist, however, the choice of one or other by an individual is almost certain to have social meaning (see Grivelet 2001)” (Sebba 2012, 4).
We can hypothesize that Kazakh spelling reforms of the 1920s-30s seem to exemplify the aspiration to make Kazakh more “inter-translatable” with Russian that was a transmitter of Western, European modernization. This can be confirmed by similar research on Chuvash (i Font 2015) being burdened essentially by the
phonology of two languages: itself and Russian. The author argues that the spelling of the Russian loanwords in Chuvash (in the same way they are spelled in Russian) codifies the subordinate status of Chuvash and that one must know how to
pronounce Russian, one has to be familiar with Russian phonology in order to correctly read Chuvash texts:
“The spelling of the Chuvash language does not depend on the properties of the language itself, but on another language (and is subordinated to the tasks of studying it), which implies that the status of the Chuvash is lower than Russian. This feeling is enhanced by native speakers due to the huge number of borrowings from Russian, while maintaining the pronunciation and spelling of the source language” (118).
This phenomenon highlights the power dynamics at play in language reform issues and the implications for the perceived status and identity of minority
languages. Similarly, in the context of Kazakh, the adoption of Russian phonological patterns and the spelling of Russian loanwords according to their Russian
counterparts served to further subordinate the Kazakh language to the dominant Russian culture. The parallel between the Chuvash and Kazakh cases suggests a broader pattern of linguistic assimilation and cultural subordination within the Soviet Union. Both instances reflect the desire to align minority languages with Russian, thereby reinforcing the dominance of the Russian language and culture.
However, it was also important to choose the Latin-based writing system per se and not Cyrillic nor Arabic-based to practice the so-called “anti-modelling” and
visually distance both from Russian imperial, colonial practices on the one hand and Islamic, religious influence on the other.
In the discussions of Kazakh spelling in general, the so-called “scientific
discourse” seems to be the dominant one as well. It seems to be following the same pattern that was described by Eira (1998):
“Since the Scientific Discourse is currently the most influential in the western world, it operates within mainstream western academia at a deep level approaching invisibility. There is a tendency within this ideology to pass off any motivation other than the scientific as "superstitious" or
"unenlightened". However, when people educated in the western mode assume rights of educational authority over an aliterate people, this also could be called unenlightened; to presume unquestioningly the superiority of a phonemic over a logographic script is no more rational a position than a
superstition. In the last analysis, scientific methodology is deemed superior because it is scientific — a circularity of argumentation which indicates its status as Discourse.” (177).
Appeals on being “scientifically” more suitable or relevant were presented, for instance, by both sides during the Latinization campaign of the 1920s, as we will see later, when the advocates speculated on how the Arabic scripts were hindering the
analytic capabilities and abstract thinking abilities of children, and the opponents, on how the Latin script impede the literacy campaign (Martin 2001, 191).
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF KAZAKH ORTHOGRAPHY
In order to analyze changes in Kazakh orthography and its connection to political processes, it is crucial to first map out the general historical background that would serve as a framework for the analysis. Although the political system drastically changed in the 1920s, the newly established autonomous republic of Kazakhstan inherited the linguistic debates of the previous years, perhaps similar with Turkey in the same period (Aytürk 2008, 277).
ETHNOGRAPHIC MATERIALS OF THE LATE XIX CENTURY
The earliest attempts to establish a writing system for Kazakh are often
attributed to Ybyrai Altynsarin, a member of the Kazakh intelligentsia that worked on opening and promoting Russian-language, secular schools in the “Steppes”. He was a proponent of secular, Western education among Kazakhs and opposed both the Russian Orthodox Christian missionary activities and Tatar Muslim teachings. In his
“Kazakh chrestomathy” published in 1879 in which he collected tales, short stories, anecdotes in Kazakh for educational purposes, he says the following:
“...Keeping in mind, then, that in general, initial guides, chrestomathies, etc. can only serve as guides to more scientific and serious guides that can give real knowledge and useful information, and that there are almost no such books of general educational content in any of the Asian languages, we are forced to look for such guides in the nearest Russian language; as a result, we considered it more convenient to print this chrestomathy in Russian letters, so that it directly corresponds to its purpose, i.e. serves as a direct guide to more learned and generally useful Russian books, not contradicting the latter either by its content or alphabet” (1994, 81).
Altynsarin does indeed use the Russian alphabet and moreover limits himself to that. In the chrestomathy, you do not find any “special” letters for Kazakh sounds that are not present in Russian. His contemporaries who collected information on Kazakh for other purposes, namely ethnographic, scientific, and missionary purposes, seem to have differed in their approaches, too. Some did use some
special symbols for Kazakh phonemes (e.g., Ä ä and Ӱ ӱ for front vowels [æ] and [ʏ],
or Latin k instead of its Cyrillic analog for uvular [q]), like Ilminsky famous for his later works on the design of a new Cyrillic-based writing system of Tatar spoken among kryashens (Christian Tatars), in his work of 1860 on Kazakh, or Melioranski, in his work on Kazakh published in 1894. However, none of them ever propose their usage of special symbols as a distinct writing system or orthography for Kazakh, they both refer to it as “transcription”. Meanwhile, although another contemporary of these individuals, Terentiev who researched Kazakh, Turkish, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Persian does share particularly scholarly interest in Kazakh with Melioranski, he doesn’t use any special symbols for transcribing Kazakh in his work published in 1875, earlier than Melioranski’s work but later than that of Ilminsky. The only exception is Ў ў for the approximant [w]. Interestingly enough, it is Terentiev in particular who argues that “it would be desirable to introduce the Russian alphabet among the Kazakhs, which perfectly expresses all the sounds of their language” (1875, 120).
However, based on the lack of any particular actively promoted projects and openly expressed ideas, we can conclude that the usage of special symbols was merely attempts in transcribing Kazakh words with Russian letters with varying degrees of precision rather than a serious attempt to establish a full-fledged writing system for long-term purposes. Altynsarin’s purposes in using the Russian alphabet for Kazakh were also solely educational, not reformist — that is how he describes it himself, that is, he uses the “synthesis” of the Kazakh language and Russian writing system in order to facilitate the learning of the Russian language, which he considers crucial for enlightenment and education, for Kazakh children in general. Ilminsky who
“attached the greatest importance to the native languages in the matter of the proper development of children and peoples” agrees with Altynsarin. According to him,
“...the successful acquisition of the state language (Russian) is unthinkable without
the systematic help of the native language”, it was believed that “when Russian literacy is preceded by native literacy, the former is assimilated more easily, more consciously and more firmly” (Bukvar dlya kirgiz 1908, I). So, their objective was not as much about the Kazakh language or its writing system as it was about making the acquisition of Russian language easier for Kazakhs. However, the reaction appears to have been varied: at least, there is a record of negative reaction, suspicion, and incomprehension of the objective behind the usage of Russian alphabet for Kazakh by Kazakhs, as it could be seen in the text of a petition of 1905:
“Since 1902, the so-called aul schools for Kazakh boys have been opened in the Governor- Generalship of the Steppes. In these schools, teaching is conducted in the Kazakh language, the Kazakhs asked that Kazakh literacy be taught in the aforementioned schools, but they were denied this. In these schools, Kazakh children are taught to write Kazakh words in Russian letters, which do not convey Kazakh phonetics. The Kazakhs understood the refusal to have a teacher to teach Kazakh literacy and the introduction of the Russian alphabet into the Kazakh alphabet in the sense that the village schools did not pursue the goal of education, but something unknown, and as a result, they refused to send their children to these schools” (Sak 2014, 243).
Another important thing is that Ilminsky, Melioranski, and Altynsarin all seem concerned about the influence of Tatar on Kazakh. In his work, Ilminsky argues:
“Unfortunately, Muslim literacy, brought to the steppe by the Tatars and now spreading among the Kazakhs, has taken a Tatar direction; so that in all Kazakh correspondence there is hardly one paper, one letter, which would be written purely in Kazakh”, he goes on to comment on the
shortcomings of the Arabic alphabet as well: “...besides, the Arabic-Tatar alphabet does not accurately express Kazakh sounds, especially vowels” (1860, 109).
Two decades later, in 1879, Altynsarin expresses a similar concern when emphasizing the importance of his work:
“Due to the illiteracy of the Kazakh people and the lack of any books published in the Kazakh language, the teachers of educational institutions are forced to use the Tatar language instead of the Kazakh language when teaching Kazakh children. Therefore, even if there is no visible benefit, the students will have to leave their mother tongue, which has no disadvantages, and learn the Tatar language. On the other hand, the literary language of Tatars is full of Arabic and Persian words, as even scholars from Tatars despise this language; therefore, it is incomprehensible to illiterate Kazakhs. All the books published in this language are written only about religion, so they are
unsuitable for use in Russian-Kazakh schools, which have more secular goals in this regard…” (1994, 80).
In 1894, Melioranski joins them, too:
“The Kazakhs have been and are learning to read and write from the Tatars, who instill in them that their language is a corrupted, impure language, and at the same time, not even the Tatar, but the Ottoman or Jagatai language is often taken as the norm, and teach them to try to "decorate" their
"poor" language with words borrowed from the sacred language of Arabic or Persian. Due to these reasons, Kazakh mullahs and literate people now began to write in a truly "corrupted and impure"
Kazakh language, which is often even incomprehensible to their uneducated compatriots” (4).
In his poem written in 1887, Abay, one of the most prominent poets of Kazakhstan, although does not mention Tatar in particular, seems to criticize the usage of “foreign” words in poems:
“If there is a foreign word among them (words in a poem), That means the poet is an ignorant poor thing”
Although sometimes these lines are interpreted as a comment on the choice of words in general, not necessarily in their etymological aspect (as it is done by
Issemberdiyeva in Kunanbayev 2020, 92: “Should the movement of the poem be marred with one ill-chosen word, // It will expose the poet’s ignorance and want of skill”), the word boten could be translated as “foreign” or “alien”, too. So, perhaps, all these documents capture some negative attitude towards the Tatar linguistic
influence on Kazakh already present in the second half of the XIX century — perhaps it reflected the trend towards vernacularization.
TSARIST NEWSPAPERS
The print industry in Kazakhstan seems to have witnessed its first boom in the second decade of the XX century, the 1910s. Although prior to that, in the late XIX century, namely in the 1880s-90s, there were some newspapers, such as Dala Walayati Gazeti, the ones published in the 1910s were to an extent more
“grassroots'' in the sense that they were not state-sponsored or state-controlled, meanwhile the former were initially established with the main purpose of informing the public of the Tsar’s, government’s and local administration’s decrees, decisions, ukaz, and reforms.
One of the first, earliest clear examples of a serious attempt to make a case for reforming the writing system for Kazakh could be found in the Dala ualayatynyn gazeti (Kazakh Steppe Newspaper) that used to be published in the years 1888–
1902 in Omsk, the administrative center of the Governor-Generalship of the Steppes, Russian Empire. In an article by Rakhymzhan Duisenbayev published in 1897, a journalist, translator, and a statesman, he argues that the Arabic alphabet used for Kazakh should either be abandoned or reformed to fit the needs of the phonology of Kazakh. He often refers to some earlier comments by other people and reflects on them, which, on its own, suggests that a full-fledged discourse was already there, before Duisenbayev’s article per se. For instance, he argues against a reportedly existing opinion that the Kazakh writing system should be reformed by someone who speaks several languages. Duisenbayev does not find it necessary to have a
polyglot for that matter and points out that there hardly are literate Kazakhs, not to mention polyglots, then he goes on to propose that they, the literate Kazakhs, should gather and come up with a reformed writing system on their own, without waiting for a multilingual scholar to appear and tackle the issue. If there are some “mistakes”, they could be later corrected by those very “multilingual scholars”, if necessary, he argues (Sak 2014, 9-11; Abilkasymov 1971, 27).
Also, he cites Dinmukhamed Sultangazin’s (one of the editors of the
newspaper, statesman) earlier article on the same issue (of which I could not find the whole version), they both agree that the Arabic alphabet is not suitable for Turkic languages, but their viewpoints differ when it comes to the solution of the problem.
Sultangazin seems to have argued that although the Arabic writing system is ill- suited for Kazakh, Kazakhs should keep it because they have been using it for a very long time (Abilkasymov 1971, 27-28). In Duisenbayev’s citation, he also
mentions that Turks and Persians did not change the Arabic alphabet and that the Turks “don’t even write vowels”, unlike them, and still they manage to read their languages (Sak 2014, 10). We can see that a distinct alphabet and standardized, vernacularized writing system herald the educational, technological progress:
“Today, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and American peoples have made the alphabet so simple that in two or three days a child can recognize letters and write. And you
understand better what they write than what they say orally. It is difficult to understand what we write, because there are many similar words, because there are not enough letters, and there is no science and knowledge without the alphabet. It cannot exist without him. After the emergence of the alphabet, science and knowledge also will emerge. Also although the alphabet exists, if there are too many shortcomings, it creates too many barriers for promoting science and education. If you start a business and it is easy for you, you will have fun and enjoy your work. If you can't understand yourself, you will be disappointed and you will not want to do it again. When a child begins to read, if he understands the meaning of what he has learned, he will read with pleasure, this will later be a motivation for him to finish school, and at any time it will determine life choices, too, good or bad. The Arabic alphabet has disadvantages and problems with the Kazakh language. The letters are written in one way at the beginning, different at the end and in the middle, which confuses the child to a great extent. In my opinion, when reading the Quran or religious texts, it should be read in Arabic, but I wish that Kazakh stories, poems, fairy tales and some scientific subjects should be written in letters that have been deliberately corrected to make it easier for Kazakhs” (11).
However, Dala ualayatynyn gazeti (1888-1902) was not the first ever
newspaper to be published in Kazakh, it was Turkistan ualayatynyn gazeti that used to be published from 1870 until 1883 in Tashkent. Although there could be found no example of a serious discussion of the writing system used for Kazakh in Turkistan ualayatynyn gazeti, it already shows many examples of somewhat purist, nationalist tendencies among Kazakhs regarding the language and calls for orthographic standardization (Abilkasymov 1971, 20). For instance, already in 1876, a language used in a short story called “Kozha Gafan wa ham Saduakas” is harshly criticized for being lexically too “Tatarized”. The author shows examples of words that were
written, according to him, not in a Kazakh, but a Tatar manner, and also manages to distinguish between the internal dialects of Tatar, too, concluding that the publication was probably initially written in Kazakh but later copied by a Tatar, and probably, he supposes, a Tobol Tatar, not Kazan Tatar (Abilkasymov 1971, 10-11). This article exemplifies that already in the 1870s, the general literate population in Central Asia
had a sense of ethnic, national identification and even were aware of internal
linguistic divisions of other neighboring ethnicities. Once again, we cannot ignore the persistent presence of Tatar in almost any discussion of the Kazakh language, its vocabulary and writing system. In the XVIII and XIX centuries, Tatars had a
privileged status within the expanding Russian Empire, serving as trusted individuals in various roles such as merchants, political representatives, educators, and
administrators in recently acquired Central Asian regions (Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopedia 2023). Again, it might be the reflection of the trend towards the vernacularization that was common across many countries at the time (the establishment of Republican Turkish to replace Ottoman Turkish in Turkey, the establishment of Azerbaijani literary language, etc.).
Reportedly, the editors of the Turkistan ualayatynyn gazeti were also
supportive of promoting Kazakh oral literature that was considered by many as “truly”
Kazakh and its topics were reportedly found relatable for the Kazakh masses. In contrast, an author named G. Shonayev seems to have been harshly against the inclusion of Kazakh oral literature, saying that a reading, literate person does not need to read those poems as they were composed simply for a fleeting prize and were not educational enough. Instead, he thinks Kazakh readers should learn more about the Tatar literature. The editorial staff later publishes a refutation of
Shonayev’s claims by providing examples of Shortanbay composing poems not only for a contest but also to portray the harsh living conditions of his people, for instance, Zar zaman (Abilkasymov 1971, 17-18).
Shonayev seems to have been persistent in his sympathy towards Tatar language and Tatar literature, as in 1889, he also wrote a reply to Adykov who argued in favor of writing Kazakh books in a “purer” Kazakh, arguing that Tatar
books are easily comprehensible by Kazakhs and there are almost no differences between Tatars and Kazakhs (because of a common religion and writing system).
There were other "pro-Tatar” intellectuals. In language-related discussions, we can point out the materials published by Sultangazin and Kurmanbayev where they emphasize the importance of considering Kazakh a distinct language, a language undoubtedly genetically related to Sart (Uzbek) and Noghai (Tatar), but still a different language. In doing so, they support their claims by mentioning some examples of regular correspondence between Kazakh and Tatar, such as [ʒ] in Kazakh corresponding [j] in Tatar, Tatar [ʃ] corresponding to Kazakh [s], and Tatar [m] corresponding to Kazakh [b]. They claimed that Kazakh formed as a distinct language in its own cultural environment, in isolation from other Turkic languages.
Thus, they refute the idea (that arguably started with Gasprinsky’s articles in the 1880s) that an artificial written language should be created common for all Turkic peoples and the idea that Tatar is a higher, literary variety of Kazakh (Abilkasymov 1971, 21-24).
Overall, there were limitations to purist tendencies as well, as it can be seen in Sultangazin’s quite descriptivist statements:
“Of course, we have no place and it is impossible for us to object to the borrowing of words to the Kazakh language by anyone. Whatever the reason, the more words we have, the richer our language is, the richer our thoughts are. On the other hand, if the mind increases, the word number will increase. Even so, it is not possible for writers like us to keep the Kazakh language in one manner, because the language and speech of the people grows, changes, transforms like the people themselves” (Abilkasymov 1971, 25).
Meanwhile, Kurmanbayev also argued in favor of borrowing certain words from other languages that are, in his opinion, necessary since Kazakh is not rich in terms of “scientific terminology” (Abilkasymov 1971, 25).
The orthography of Russian loanwords and their phonotactic adaptation into Kazakh was another important topic in the discussions of the vocabulary of Kazakh, as or example, we can be witnessed from another article by Sultangazin published in 1890:
“Regarding the Russian words that have entered the Kazakh language: when writing them, you should pay attention to the simplicity of the words and how understandable they are to Kazakhs. As long as it is understandable for Kazakhs, you should try to write it in a way similar to the way Russians pronounce it. For example, Kazakhs say jandaral, janaral, and they also understand the word general“ general”. That's why it should be written as general. Many Russian words have not changed in the Kazakh language. For example, the words knyaz, sudya“ judge”, pisar“ clerk””
(Abilkasymov 1971, 26).
And in the second group are the words that entered the Kazakh language later mostly through the written language, the originals of which have not been forgotten, and Sultangazin proposes the principle that they should be preserved in the way they are written in those languages (Abilkasymov 1971, 26). This perhaps can be considered as one of the earliest instances of the trend to standardize the written language among Kazakhs.
GRASSROOTS NEWSPAPERS
The first newspapers and magazines published by local Kazakh activists with the help of different patrons and merchants were “Kazakstan” published in 1911- 1913, first in Bokey Orda and then in Uralsk, both in today’s West Kazakhstan region; “Kazak” published once in 1907, and then reorganized and published again regularly from 1913 until 1918 in Orynbor (published in 265 issues, having 3007 subscribers in 1914); and “Alash” published regularly for a year in 1916-1917 in Tashkent, its name being an alternative for the ethnonym “Kazak” in a range of interpretations. There was also another important political-social magazine Aikap (published in 88 issues, 1000-2000 circulations).
In these newspapers and magazines, one of the recurring topics is the one of national “awakening”, mobilization, “progress”, unification, and these materials seem to have often involved extensive discussions and debates on the writing systems and literacy in general as well. This, once again, emphasizes the role of nationalism in all the different discussions of the writing systems and reforms surrounding it.
The first decade of the XX century is notable for the fact that there seems to be a 9-year gap in the Kazakh press between the year when the Dala ualayatynyn gazeti closed in 1902 and the newspaper “Kazakhstan” began its life in 1911.
However, it was in this interval, oddly enough, that petitions were printed with several demands on the promotion of the Kazakh language. For instance, there was a
requirement for permission to open a Kazakh newspaper without the Tsarist censorship: “...to clarify the current needs of the Kazakh people, it is necessary to publish newspapers in the Kazakh language, which requires the establishment of complacency for the publication of newspapers without prior censorship and the opening of a printing house” (Sak 2014, 244). The petition was signed by 12767 people, and a different one in the same year reads: “...to allow the Kazakh people the construction of …facilities among the Kazakhs of printing houses for the
publication of newspapers and books” (246). These petitions exemplify how Kazakhs were demanding a free, “grassroots” press that would serve the purpose of sharing important news and public concerns.
In 1911, the first grassroots newspaper “Kazakhstan” was established in Bokei Orda in Kazakh and Russian. Although the newspaper did discuss political, social issues, it does not seem to have discussed the writing system or the reform thereof.
In the same year, another periodical publication started as well – Aikap magazine that was published from 1911 to 1915 and used by Kazakh thinkers and scholars to
discuss political and social matters, with a name referring to a Kazakh interjection expressing some regret or dismay, in this case, apparently for not being literate, knowledgeable, educated enough as a nation.
In 1913, in one of the issues of Aikap, an author named Shahzaman Shiyashov harshly criticized Ahmet Baitursynuly’s2 proposed ideas on the alphabet reform. A copy of an earlier issue of Aikap where the initial material of Baitursynuly that prompted Shiyashov’s response seems to be absent. However, based on the comments by Shiyashov, we can, to an extent, reconstruct what Baitursynuly proposed. Seemingly, Baitursynuly suggested getting rid of the “redundant” Perso- Arabic letters in the Kazakh writing system that reportedly are not present in Kazakh phonology, like ژ [ʒ], a Persian letter¹ (that is very rarely used in Persian itself) or ف [f] which apparently gets adapted into [p] or [b] in Kazakh: for instance, Kazakh bata or batiha, the name of a special spiritual ritual in gatherings and prayers, is derived from Arabic Fātiḥa, the name of the first, “opening” chapter of the Quran and Kazakh kauip‘ danger ’is derived from Arabic ḵawf‘ fear ’(Mamyrbekova 2017). In criticizing Baitursynuly’s ideas, Shiyashov mentions the importance of the ideas of Ismail Gasprinsky, a prominent figure in the pan-Turkist ideology, –– in fact, his article is called Birge kozgalalyk (“Let’s advance together”). Shiyashov seems to have misread or misinterpreted some of the linguistic terminology used by Baitursynuly.
For example, commenting on the explanation of the Kazakh sound system, where
1 Although the voiced postalveolar fricative [ʒ] and voiced postalveolar affricate [d͡ʒ] are allophones in Kazakh, traditionally the character ج that is pronounced as the latter in Classical Arabic is preferred.
2 (1872 – 1937) a prominent Kazakh linguist, was a member of the Alash Orda movement, which sought to establish an independent Kazakh state, chief editor of the newspaper “Kazak”, opposed the Latinization campaign and was instead in favor of modifying and adapting the Arabic script to Kazakh phonology
Baitursynuly listed 5 vowels, 17 consonants, and 2 semi-vowels (which are called dauysty, dauyssyz, and jarty dauysty, which literally mean “voiced”, “voiceless”, and
“half-voiced” in Kazakh, respectively), Shiyashov proposes to refer to all the 28 letters (he does not seem to distinguish between sounds and letters) as “semi- vowels” –– jarty dauysty (Sak 2014, 17–19).
Later, the article by Shiyashov is tackled by Alikhan Bokeikhanov, one of the future leaders of the Alash movement, under a nickname Azamat Alashuly. He refutes the claims of Shiyashov and points out his misreadings. He argues that Akhmet Baitursynuly’s suggestions do not go against the common goals pursued by Tatars and Kazakhs, that the usul jadid (a series of socio-cultural reforms proposed by Gasprinsky, including the writing system reform) that Shiyashov is apparently in favor of is actually all about Baitursynuly’s ideas of facilitating the Arabic-based scripts for the necessities of Kazakh and Kazakh children in particular. He points out that Shiyashov is making a groundbreaking “discovery” in the world of linguistics by claiming that all the 28 sounds in Kazakh are “semi-vowels”. He emphasizes the importance of the so-called Turkic brotherhood, the common roots, but he also asks if by omitting certain unnecessary letters from an alphabet, automatically they will stop being part of the “Turkic” world:
“Will religion and our worldview change because of it? Isn’t it a joy that the Kazakh people, who are a branch of the Turkic race, try not to fall behind their kins, find an even faster way to keep pace with them, and strive forward? Can we join the competition in the modern age of art and education, not seeing our shortcomings, not correcting our mistakes, simply worshiping the spirits of our ancestors saying “we are also Turkic descendants”?” (19–21).
However, Bokeikhanuly does not fully agree with Baitursynuly and requests him to reconsider one particular aspect of his suggested reforms –– the letters for the voiceless fricatives ف [f] and ح [h] (in Arabic, the sound it denotes is a pharyngeal one [ħ], not glottal). He supports his claim by saying that there are words and
personal names borrowed from Persian and Arabic that have this letter: “Akhmet, Mukhamedzhan, Fazyl” (21).
Afterwards, in his article, Baitursynuly provides a considerably lengthy reply to Shahzaman Shiyashov’s comments. He asks important questions that help to map out the crucial concepts in the conversation, like “Should the language serve the needs of the writing system or should the writing system serve the needs of the language?” or “Does language precede the writing system or vice versa? Did Kazakh exist, as a language, even before the Arabic script or not?”. He also provides
examples from the existing literature (mentioned by Shiyashov himself), where the Arabic letters ف [f] and ژ [ʒ] are specifically shown as both non-Tatar and non- Kazakh letters. Also, Baitursynuly makes a case for standardizing the language and finding patterns and rules in it:
Nahwu Sarf means the science of laws of language. A language should have its own laws. If there is a law, there also must be science. If water freezes, it will become ice, and if chlorine and sodium are mixed, they become salt. These are the laws of nature. There are similar laws in
language. If chlorine and sodium are mixed, we can learn by observing and searching that salt will be formed. The law of language should be learnt in the same way. In the Kazakh language, a word does not mix back vowels and front vowels. Isn't this the law of our language?” (27).
He goes on to elaborate on his views, by saying that his suggestions are not against the Arabic script per se or the Muslim religious education in general, quite the contrary, he is harshly criticizing those who argue that the Arabic alphabet does not fit the Kazakh language and that Kazakh language should switch to a completely different writing system (probably Cyrillic or Latin were being suggested). Ahmet Baitursynuly argues that Kazakhs will never accept any other writing system as the Arabic alphabet is deeply intertwined with the religion and culture of Kazakhs. He then mentions that the irregularities in the Kazakh orthography are not only his concerns, but those of many (28):
“It's not only me, but also others who provide many comments about disorder and deficiency in our orthography. If there were no flaws, no one would have said anything. We do not tell the Kazakhs to do this and that just because they cannot make a living. We say that if there is a defect or disorder in your life, you should sort it out and put it in order, and there actually is such a flaw and irregularity, in our writing. It should be adjusted and repaired. The irregularity of our writing causes hindrance whenever we want to publish a textbook, and whenever we are teaching a child, it causes hindrance once again. Whenever we want to produce a grammar of Kazakh, it creates a huge obstacle. You say that textbooks with these twenty-eight letters are already being printed and distributed. You are right.
But those know some methodics of pedagogy are aware of the fact there are flaws in those books”
(29).
Later in an article in the newspaper Kazakh that was published in the years 1913–1918, Shakarim, a prominent Kazakh poet and a close relative of Abay, also comments on the circulating ideas on the alphabet reform and especially
suggestions made by Baitursynuly. He focuses on some specific details and
suggests his own alternative ideas. To sum up, he suggests indicating some of the sounds with the so-called harakats, symbols that are not full letters but diacritics traditionally marking short vowels in Arabic script. In his response, Baitursynuly argues against this idea by saying that this will cause problems in typing.
The discussion of the alphabet seems more detailed in the grassroots
newspapers, compared to the Tsarist newspapers. If the Tsarist newspapers capture the very emergence of the national idea of Kazakhs, grassroots newspapers reflect the thrive to modernization. The historical discourses about the Kazakh language in the 19th century laid the foundation for many of the debates that continued during the Soviet era. These debates included discussions about the choice of script, the spelling conventions that should be used, and the relationship between language, culture, and national identity.
Korenizatsiya
After the establishment of the Soviet Union, korenizatsiya was one of the very first grand policies conducted throughout the Union. Korenizatsiya was a policy introduced in the Soviet Union in the 1920s aimed at promoting the development of
national, local, ethnic cultures and identities. It had different goals stated, most important of them being the promotion of equality and recognition for oppressed, colonized peoples. Ethnic minorities were encouraged to develop their own
vernacular languages and cultures. The discussion of the korenizatsiya campaign per se is of vital importance as it was the general umbrella term for a number of different “indigenization” processes, such as language standardization that involved Latinization of the script, ethnic classification, ethnic recognition, among others.
Haugen emphasizes the significance of the standardization of the vernacular language in the nation-building process, referring to the magnum opus of Benedict Anderson (2003, 126), while Martin underlines the significance of the alphabet reform within the language standardization per se as the “major practical project in language construction and an even more important symbolic battleground in the politics of national identity” (Martin 2001, 184).
The cultural changes were happening at different levels in the 1920s. Cultural transformations were not limited to top-down orders from Moscow, but also involved, to some extent, grassroots movements that were intending to incorporate the new ideology into the traditions and semi-ethnic identities, such as the Red Yurts movement in Kazakhstan (Ramsay 2021, 22) or Red Teahouses in Uzbekistan (Roosien 2021, 509).
There are different interpretations of the korenizatsiya campaign. From one hand, in the work of Martin (2001), Bolsheviks seem to be generally described as those who needed help from the national elites, as those who were somehow vulnerable and reliant on the latter. Martin mentions the enthusiasm with which the Turkic peoples were celebrating their Turkic identity and thus strengthening the pan- Turkist ideas:
“Nowhere was this pan-Turkism more vividly on display than at the 1926 Turkological Congress in Baku. Its very occurrence, with invited guests from Turkey and Hungary (the latter being considered a member of the larger Altaic language group), was striking. It is difficult to imagine an analogous pan-Finnic congress in Karelia, much less a pan-Slavic one in Minsk. The congress' speeches were filled with Turkic pride and calls for Turkic unity. An Uzbek objected to being confused with the Iranian Tajiks: "In their features, there is absolutely nothing Turkic." An Oirot spoke movingly of how he had only recently discovered "that I am a Turk." He protested another delegate's claim they were only turkicized Mongols: "I protest against such a definition, because I want to be a member of that nation, which is represented at this congress [my emphasis]." He then asked that "the Turkological congress uncover the history of the Oirots.”” (Martin 2001, 193).
It seems that the political power of pan-Turkist ideas simply cannot be overemphasized. In the same book, the role of Islam is described as significant, crucial, and the description of its scale and power seem to imply certain urgency that it must have aroused in Bolsheviks ’minds:
“The rhetoric of Latinization, then, presented the campaign as in service of the destructive role of cultural revolution: the assault on Islam and "feudal" ways of thinking. It is not surprising that the largely symbolic campaign of Latinization assumed such a large presence during the early years of NEP and in fact became the first eastern cultural revolutionary project to earn central sanction. For these were the same years when the coercive cultural revolutionary campaign against Islam and the veiling of women had stalled. In the mid-1920s, Islam was in a much stronger position than
Orthodoxy. There had been no time for a campaign against Islam analogous to the one carried out against Orthodoxy from 1918 to 1922. Islamic schools, courts, and charitable organizations were all still functioning in the mid-1920s and were often more influential than the competing Soviet
organizations. Likewise female veiling remained the largely unchallenged norm in many regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus. In this environment, Latinization allowed eastern reformers to undertake at least a symbolic assault on Islam” (Martin 2001, 190 – 191).
To an extent, Latinization may seem to have been a grassroots campaign, too, that is, it had eager advocates among the general population. Also, Martin
accentuates the supposedly inherently anti-Russian character of the Latinization campaign, especially when it came to the Russian language per se, by citing Iakovlev’s theses on the Russian script or the Cyrillic representing a “russificatory role”, a “weapon of propaganda of Russian imperialism abroad”, and a “national
bourgeoisie” (2001, 197). However, it is unclear to what extent were these sentiments or ideas widely shared by the public in the Soviet Union. Martin talks about how korenizatsiya and Latinization sanctioned Russophobia (194). However, Ubiria argues that korenizatsiya policy should not be considered a desperate compromise between the Bolsheviks and the national elites:
“...it must be emphasized that korenizatsiya in Central Asia should not be viewed as some sort of a forced political concession by the Kremlin to the pressures stemming from the indigenous popular masses or the political elites. In fact, none of the korenizatsiya policies in the region were necessarily implemented as an attempt to reflect the demands of the targeted population groups. For example, in 1923, the Soviet decision to develop a secular Uzbek national culture for the state-defined not-yet- formed Uzbek nation can hardly be regarded as a mere fulfillment of long-established or emerging nationalist aspirations of mainly illiterate, conservative-religious would-be Uzbek nationals. It is worth reminding that just a few years before the Sovietization of Central Asia, most of the latter people showed an absolute indifference to the quasi-secular educational and cultural undertakings initiated by the local Jadids. Rather, the korenizatsiya policies for Central Asia, which were conceived and carefully planned by Soviet officials in Moscow, derived from the Soviet government’s ideological and strategic objectives in the region. They were an integral part of general Soviet nationality and
modernization policies of the time, which aimed to accelerate and support building modern, Western- style societies and national communities out of fragmented, traditional semi-feudal agrarian/nomadic communities in the Soviet east, including Central Asia. Finally, it must be kept in mind that
notwithstanding their nationalistic outlook, the korenizatsiya policies came with clear strings attached:
the development of national cultures and literary languages for the state-recognized nationalities in Central Asia were justifiable and admissible as long as they served the purpose of the rooting of communist ideology and principles in the respective communities” (Ubiria 2018, 149).
Ubiria, on the other hand, seems to question the importance and autonomy of national elites in korenizatsiya. Ubiria also argues against the argument about the Cyrillic script being used because of the great fear of the pan-Turkist unity, caused by the switch of the Turkish republic to the Latin script (154).
What seems quite interesting is that Ubiria admits, for some reason, that there truly was a practical or, rather, a technical justification for abandoning the Arabic- based script (154), and that the Arabic script is inherently unsuitable for Turkic language due to the insufficiency of symbols for vowels, which are of great
importance for Turkic phonologies. If we consider how Uighurs modified the Perso- Arabic script and added diacritics and how Ahmet Baitursynuly adapted it into the phonetics of the Kazakh language, the point about Arabic-based script being
somewhat inherently and inevitably ill-suited for Turkic languages appears very weak. Even when adopting Latin and Cyrillic scripts, Turkic languages had to use additional diacritics to represent many sounds, as they are now conventionally referred to as “specific”. The discussion of “suitability” of a writing system for a
language seems to be almost exclusively a matter of ideologies and associations, as discussed above.
Actually, the Latinization campaign, which was particularly energetic and thus quick in Turkey, might have served as a catalyst and an example for the Latinization campaign in the Soviet Union as well. Meanwhile, Smith (1998) also seems to emphasize the agency of “Moscow” in determining the script and setting certain objectives in supporting campaigns:
“Yet Latinization also offered Moscow the perfect opportunity to begin to undermine the power of the Muslim clerical establishment, as symbolized through the strange and mystical letters of the Arabic script. Documents from these years consistently spoke of the need to suppress the influence of Muslim clerical educators, and as a consequence the Arabic alphabet and language of the Quran. By forcing the Latin alphabet as the new medium of script literacy, the party would mount an impassable barrier between traditional Islamic print culture and the masses of new "Soviet" literates. Since the vast majorities of the Turkic and indigenous populations of the east were still illiterate, control over alphabet politics meant control over them” (Smith 1998, 125).
Meanwhile, according to Hirsch (2004), the Russian linguistic and cultural dominance never faded, nor was it under any particularly serious threat or “reverse”
discrimination by the non-Russian cultures ’growth. She provides the following argument, emphasizing the dominance and “defaultness” of ethnic Russians as people who are entitled to all the territories of the Soviet Union (69).
Hirsch repeatedly and explicitly emphasizes how the Russification practices that started occurring in the 1930s-40s are not actually a “retreat” or any radical change in the direction of the social engineering policies of the Soviet Union, as, for instance, it was suggested by Martin, but rather the continuation of the so-called
“state-sponsored evolutionism”, according to the logic of which, clans and tribes amalgamate into nationalities, and those later amalgamate into “socialist-era nations”.
Therefore, according to Hirsch, from the very beginning, the Soviet Union did not intend to celebrate different ethnicities and nationalities and leave them as they are on their own, and then suddenly decided to turn to Russification, but rather it used the korenizatsiya and simultaneous processes as tools for making a more or less equal framework for further successful amalgamation or merging into each other, apparently without traumas or inequalities, but with enthusiasm (9). The commitment of Bolsheviks to these ideas and the Latinization being an inevitable part of the korenizatsiya policies might suggest that the Latinization per se, however grassroots it might seem, was mainly deliberately used by the Bolsheviks. That is, perhaps the question of switching the scripts of different nationalities and unifying them eventually into one script system was not a question of “if” but of “when”, since the establishment of the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, in Turkmenistan, Edgar argues (2006), the Latinization campaign gained wide support and, surprisingly, was not met with strong opposition. Most Turkmen intellectuals thought the Latinization to be “desirable and necessary”. Even those Turkmen linguists who contributed to creating the Arabic-based alphabet of the Turkmen language do not seem to have opposed the Latinization reform, or at least there is no such occurrence on record (141-142). However, it did not mean that the
switch was easy, especially for those who were accustomed to the old Arabic-based script (143). In general, the Turkmen scenario seems different from at least the Kazakh one, in which relatively influential leaders and intellectuals were opposing the Latinization campaign (Baitursynuly 2013 [1927], 277).
The recent history of language reforms in Turkmenistan seems to be an interesting case to compare to Kazakhstan in general. Like Kazakh, the Turkmen language was also heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian languages as a result of a centuries-long language contact, the presence of a shared Muslim identity, and the Persianate hegemony in the region. Moreover, Turkmens also used Chagatai or Turki as the literary language of courts, rule, science, law, and high-level
communication. Similarly to Kazakh, although there was no standardized Turkmen vernacular established, there was a written language rooted in Turkmen.
In the beginning of the XX century, many Turkmens were in favor of
establishing a common standardized “literary” Turkmen language. If some of the Turkmen native intellectuals were inspired by the popular at the time European trends with which they became familiar through contact with the Russian colonial rule, others were influenced by Ottoman Turkish nationalists and the Jadid
movement. However, Turkmen nationalists had a different linguistic ambition than what Jadids or the Ottoman Turkish nationalists had. While the Turkic nationalists or pan-Turkists in the Russian empire or the Ottoman empire were promoting the idea of a common written Turkic language, and while the Jadids were also campaigning for a common language for different Turkic peoples, although including in their Turkistani identity agenda a much smaller geographical entity, the Turkmen intelligentsia was rather particularly focused on establishing a vernacular written language. The Turkmen elites at the time seem to have had a strong identity tied to
the genealogical and political traditions that were separating them from other Turkistani people. The extent to which Turkmens were rejecting both the idea of a pan-Turkist identity and the pan-Turkistani identity can also be seen in the
xenophobia expressed by Turkmens against other Turkic nations in the first decades of the Soviet Union. They also expressed concerns that within the proposed
paradigm of pan-Turkistanism, they would be left out as a minority and that the system of interaction would be somewhat imperial (Edgar 2006, 134 – 135).
There was a proposal to fully abandon the idea of establishing a literary Turkmen variety whatsoever and simply use the “already developed” Ottoman
Turkish or Azerbaijani language. To be precise, in 1925, one of the many Azerbaijani teachers working at the time in Ashgabat, Ferid Efendizade, published an article in the newspaper Turkmenistan, in which he was promoting the idea that Turkmen was one of the many dialects of Turkish, and it is better to abandon the “weak and
corrupted” and “perishing in the burning desert” language. He suggested that in this way Turkmens can more easily acquire cultural progress and develop at a faster pace. He even provided an example of Azerbaijani that had eliminated so-called crude sounding words and replaced them with elegant sounding, in his
understanding, Ottoman Turkish words. Doing otherwise, that is defending the Turkmen language and establishing its literary standard, Efendizade argued, would be “stupid chauvinism” or even a “crime”. However, the idea was rejected and met with hostile reaction, and the person who expressed it was accused of “pan-Turkism”
and “petit bourgeois nationalism”. Edgar argues that “[i]n their attacks on Effendizade, the insistence of Turkmen intellectuals on maintaining the
distinctiveness of the Turkmen language corresponded perfectly to the goals of Moscow’s nationality policy” (2006, 135 – 136). The ideas proposed by Ferid
Effendizade demonstrate yet another time to what extent almost any discussion of language reform is ideologized, the comments about certain words having a crude sound and other words being elegant sounding is a statement that we can
confidently say is based on a language ideology solely which itself is usually based upon certain political, hegemonic hierarchies.
Also, because of the abundance of already existing educational and
instructional materials in Azerbaijani, it was used in some disciplines at Turkmen schools, but the usage of any Turkic language other than Turkmen was also a matter of debate in which Turkmens expressed their concern that the boundary between two too close languages might become blurred and thus including any other Turkic language in the education sphere is a threat for the Turkmen nation overall.
Moreover, Turkmens were also concerned about the influence of Turkic languages spoken by influential Turkmen linguists, such as Tatar. All these facts clearly demonstrate that the Turkmen identity and the ambition to imagine, create, and protect a Turkmen nation was a powerful idea among the national elite at the time.
Moreover, it shows how the Soviet policies were a catalyst of the idea of one Turkmen nation (Edgar 2006, 136 – 138).
Establishing a new standardized writing system is normally a significant part of any language standardization process, and Turkmen was not an exception. Just like Kazakh, the Turkmen language was first written in Arabic script. During the Soviet times, it underwent an adaptation to a Turkmenized or nativized variant of the Arabic script.
The arguments in favor of switching from the Arabic-based script to the Latin- based one were practical as much as they were ideological. First, the Arabic script