Kazakhstan might soon be spelled ‘Qazaqstan’. It’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Friday ordered his government to swap the country’s Cyrillic alphabet for its Latin equivalent—in a symbolic break with its Soviet past
Scripting a master plan
The Kazakh language is part of the Turkic family and currently uses a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet with 42 letters. The country will use a 32-letter Latin alphabet after the switch
The oil-rich Central Asian country says the move is part of its modernisation strategy but it is also seen by many as an intention to distance Kazakhstan from former master Russia
A decree released by the presidency ordered the government to provide a phased transition of the Kazakh alphabet into a Latin-based script by 2025. Kazakhstan is a close ally of Russia and has the largest ethnic Russian population of the five Central Asian states that gained independence from Moscow in 1991, according to AFP
Crimean takeover troubles Kazakhs
But Moscow’s takeover of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pledge to protect compatriots beyond his country’s borders have troubled the Kremlin ally. Kazakhstan briefly used the Latin alphabet during the Soviet era before switching to Cyrillic letters in 1940, AFP adds
Qazaqstan now?
In October 2016, one of the country’s largest banks, Kazkommertsbank, was rebranded as Qazkom with a new symbol: a letter Q, according to the Wall Street Journal. “An alphabet based on the Latin script is the optimal one to reflect the phonetic range of the Kazakh language,” the bank said