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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

A similar change happened in Moldova (which first was Autonomous Moldovan Republic as a part of Ukraine and then Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic within USSR after WWII).

Moldovan was declared a language similar to, but different from Romanian, and was given a Cyrillic script [1]. Even though Moldovan is at most a dialect of Romanian.

The Soviet Union was very direct but also very effective in changing entire cultural substrates of millions of people over a very short period of time. Giving languages under its influence Cyrillic scripts was a part of that.

Note: it's not all bleak and bad, as many indigenous people got their alphabets for the first time in history.

[1] Wikipedia has a very detailed page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language?wprov=sfti1

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The Soviets also imposed (badly needed) reforms on the alphabet and spelling of Russian itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography...), getting rid of two pairs and one trio of phonetically redundant letters and the totally unnecessary appending of hard signs to the end of many but not all words that had previously been required.

But see (if only as a “fun fact”), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Cyrillic_alphabet

One of the interesting parts of the OP is that they say Soviets moved to Latinise the scripts of all people as a move to unify Communist groups (second para under "Linguistic Revolution"). Then they simply say "Cyrillic became the preferred, unifying writing system" without explanation.

Roughly, latinization was a Lenin-era policy. However, when Stalin came to power he had different goals and philosophy than the preceding regime of Lenin. For one, Stalin abandoned the idea of spreading world revolution in favour of "socialism in one country", which in large part was about keeping the USSR (and, as its satellite, Mongolia) walled off from the outside world for the sake of tighter control.

For speakers of the USSR’s Turkic languages (Kazakh, Tatar, Crimean Tatar, etc.), latinization was therefore seen as harmful, because these languages are often fairly mutually intelligible with Turkish of Turkey, and a common-ish Latin alphabet would mean these peoples would be susceptible to anti-Soviet ideas coming from Turkey. Therefore, the Stalin-era language authorities not only gave them a new Cyrillic orthography, they gave each language a different Cyrillic orthography than the rest to fragment them even further.

In the case of Mongolian, Cyrillic helped better separate Mongolian of Mongolia from the mutually intelligible dialect of Mongolian spoken across the border in China.

Sounds pretty imperialistic for an ideology based on anti-imperialism.

> they gave each language a different Cyrillic orthography than the rest to fragment them even further

That doesn't seem correct to me. Different languages require different orthographies because they have different phonetics. Compare the Latin script when used for English to German to Vietnamese to Turkish. Same thing with the Arabic script with Persian and Urdu. When tailored orthographies aren't used, the written representation becomes a poor representation of speech. Though even then it might not have been a perfect fit in the first place, requiring digraphs or diacritics. Or the spoken language can diverge.

No, the Turkic languages of Russia often have very similar phonology, but the Stalin-era language planners intentionally chose different ways to orthographically represent identical features across the languages.

For example, Turkic languages typically feature front/back vowel harmony where stops are velar before front vowels and uvular before back vowels. This is represented differently in the Stalin-era Cyrillic orthographies for Karachay Balkar (к/къ), Kazakh (к/қ) and Tatar (just к with the following vowel letter showing the distinction). Bashkir neighbors both Tatar and Kazakh and is mutually intelligible with them, and it doesn’t differ at all in this feature, but its orthography was given к/ҡ just to make it different from the other two.

Wikipedia says in the article on "Languages of the Soviet Union": "After 1937, all languages that had received new alphabets after 1917 began using the Cyrillic alphabet."

If you've got a bilingual society I can imagine it makes life easier if both languages use the same alphabet, particularly in the days of mechanical typewriters. But think too about road signs, for example, which could be written in the local language but still mostly comprehensible for Russian speakers who don't know the local language if it's the same alphabet (though there's still the classic problem of "Why are half the streets round here called Einbahnstraße?"). Learning to read a new alphabet at speed is surprisingly difficult. I'm surprised by how hard it is for me, anyway.

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