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Comment by reisse | Hacker News Reader

> In the past few years, the governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have both made a rather bold commitment: They will soon use the Latin alphabet to write their respective Turkic languages.

Oh... They didn't do even basic fact-checking, like, spending five minutes to check Wikipedia page for Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan made a decision switch from Cyrillic to Latin back in 1992, and it already went through three different iterations of Latin alphabet on the way. The 30-years transition period officially ends 1 Jan. 2023, but de-facto a lot of things from education to official documents are in Latin (or have both Latin and Cyrillic versions) for at least 20 years.

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I think you're focusing too much on the technicalities.

It's most accurate to say that after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, many former soviet states tried to "un-russify" themselves for the benefit of gaining access to global markets.

That process slowed and as Russia reconstituted, many reconnected with the Russian economy in the 2000s when oil prices were persistently high.

Then when Russia began invading neighbors to "secure" Russian speaking territories, many of the CIS states re-invigorated their efforts to eliminate Russian/Cyrillic from their countries to prevent Russia from doing the same to them.

They've been doing such things as curbing Russian-language education, shutting down Russian TV/radio stations, fining people for conducting commerce in Russian, etc...

No, that's absolutely not technicalities. By omitting the real timelines the article suggests that the efforts to eliminate Cyrillic are somehow connected or caused by Russia, and you're making the same mistake. But in reality the main cause for switch to Latin was and is the nation-building process happening since the collapse of Soviet Union.

Maybe the Russian actions could accelerate the process, but honestly, at least for Uzbekistan, the switch to Latin alphabet was mostly done in 00s already, not much to accelerate here.

> They've been doing such things as curbing Russian-language education, shutting down Russian TV/radio stations, fining people for conducting commerce in Russian, etc...

Y'know this sounds like a Russian propaganda talking points, right?

Uzbekistan certainly didn't do that, and I think Kazakhstan didn't do that either. They mostly used positive reinforcement instead of negative (e. g. "you can conduct commerce in Russian, but you have to provide service in Uzbek too").

> the nation-building process happening since the collapse of Soviet Union.

You're making a semantic argument here. The impact of "de-russification" is the same, regardless of how you want to label the motives.

> Y'know this sounds like a Russian propaganda talking points, right?

I'm stating a fact. ...and yes, the Russian media does absolutely capitalize on the restrictions on the Russian language - which is an added problem. ...but that doesn't mean that those rules don't exist. And they exist for good reason.

The restriction of the Russian language is a legitimate mechanism to limit Russian influence in their country and to build a new national identity. Ukraine, the Baltics, Central Asia - everyone has been doing it - and it has accelerated.

https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/2021-another-year-of-the-rus...

https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/can-uzbekistan-put-the-uzbek...

I wonder if the decision to switch in 1992 made much more sense given the computers of the era versus now when most everything "roughly" supports Unicode.

It didn't really, at least not in the beginning, because the Latin alphabet used in 1992 was similiar to a Turkish one, with many special symbols for Turkic sounds. However, few years later (I don't exactly remember when) it was simplified to include only a subset of "English" Latin glyphs, and special symbols were replaced by glyph pairs - so "sh" or "o`" both were a single letters in Uzbek alphabet. And now they are moving back to the special symbols.

In the next paragraph they kind of allude to it:

> The question of alphabet reform is hardly new for these countries—over the last 150 years or so, Kazakh has been written in Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic, each prevailing at different points in the language’s history.

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