Latin or Cyrillic?

     Just this week, a group of linguists in Simferopol recommended that Crimean Tatar formally switch to the Latin alphabet, and that the Crimean Tatar World Congress approve the switch.  The meeting was called by the Secretary General of the Union of Black Sea Universities, who lives in Romania.  The news item has popped up on a few sources, with some declaring that Crimean Tatar has indeed changed to the Latin script.  I don't think that is the case, although this does seem to be another step in this direction of Latinization.  But it does raise a question many have asked me - what alphabet does Crimean Tatar use?  For today, the answer is Cyrillic.  And Latin.

Unity in thought, language and action! I. Gasprinkski

Qırımtatar dili  - political, cultural and linguistic changes

     Like many of the languages in this area of the world, Crimean Tatar has undergone many changes over the past hundred years.  A relationship with a variety of powers and trends is one major factor in these changes:  Islamisation, the Crimean Khanate, the relationship with the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, Soviet rule, and post-independence Ukraine.  The deportation and 50 year exile in Central Asia was another major influence on the language - at the same time that families and communities were tragically separated, Crimean Tatar became a language of the home and lost the functions of a literary and official language.  Compounding this is the fact that many Crimean Tatars speak dialects differing to varying degrees from the literary Crimean Tatar language.  Since Crimean Tatars began to return to the Crimean Peninsula in the late '80s, there has been a strong desire to revive the Crimean Tatar language, and linguists, writers, academics, schools, communities and families have made a concerted effort to develop Crimean Tatar not only as an official language of Crimea, a status it now holds, but a living and developing language with a strong presence on the continent.  

     Writing about all of these changes is too difficult and grand a task for me, but in this post I would like to talk about one of the most obvious changes:  the alphabet used to write the language.

Three scripts in less than 30 years

     From Islamization until the beginning of the 20th century, Crimean Tatar was written in the Arabic script.  After the revolution, the language was changed to use the Latin alphabet, or the Uniform Turkic Alphabet - no language in the Soviet Union remained written in Arabic script.  Here is an example of both side by side, taken from this newspaper article (RUS):

A short time later, from the late 30s to the early 40s depending on who is counting, Crimean Tatar became a language written with the Cyrillic alphabet.  This means that during this time there were Crimean Tatars who had to learn how to read their language three times.  Can you imagine?

A cover of a 1986 trilingual children's book in Crimean Tatar, Uzbek and Russian. In Russian the title is :  "Animals, birds and insects."  The Crimean Tatar title is "What animals say."

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, many former Soviet states have begun switching their alphabets from the Cyrillic to Latin script.  One example here is Uzbek.  As I've been waiting for an excuse to post this, as an example here is a picture of two bilingual Uzbek-Russian signs I saw in a marshrutka in Simferopol. The Uzbek is above the Russian and is written with the Latin alphabet.

Crimean Tatar schools and educational materials

Language is a hot issue on many fronts in Ukraine.  Much like the infamous Ukrainian/Russian/Surzhuk question, I can't help but ask people their opinion about the script of the Crimean Tatar language.  Do you think it should be in Cyrillic or in Latin script?  Do you think it will change to Latin script in the future?  When?  How?  By whom?  Most people I ask tell me they think a switch to the Latin alphabet is inevitable.  Moving away from Cyrililc could be interpreted as a part of this post-Soviet trend towards independence and nationalization, but also a way to unite with other Turkic-speaking nations.

In one of the 16 Crimean Tatar schools in Crimea, I found that some of their signs were already written in the Latin script.  Just the change of the script here somehow elicited in me an emotional reaction - as the sayings are so very close to Turkish, I felt myself back in a Turkish elementary school with Ataturk's words and portraits.

We come and we go, but national education lives on. I. Gasprinski

School #42, Simferopol

There is a Crimean Tatar Wikipedia, with over 1,000 entries.  It uses the Latin script.

The Latin script used for Crimean Tatar is based on the Turkish alphabet with two additional letters: q and ñ.  These letters represent two sounds that don't exist in Turkish - the hard k (in Cyrillic: къ) and hard n (нъ).  (Interesting side note:  the hard n has a bit of a g sound in it.  On the off chance that you were wondering why the the lake Song in Kyrgyzstan is sometimes transliterated as Son and sometimes as Song, I think this this letter, common to the two languages, is the reason.)

The vast majority of the Crimean Tatar teaching materials I have seen have used Cyrillic.  I wonder how difficult it will be to replace all of the books, signs and teaching materials if and when the switch takes place.  Here is one lesson book that uses the Latin alphabet, which I purchased from the woman who sells books and music at КИПУ.  There is also a Cyrillic version.

Лернинг ту рйд агаин

 Changes from one alphabet to another are difficult even if you know both alphabets.  To explain it in a way I am not qualified to do, when you "learn to read" you are not only learning the process of how letters come together to make sounds, you are training your brain to recognize words and patterns so you don't have to look at each individual letter one by one.  So even a bilingual Russian and English speaker would have a difficult time reading an English text transliterated in Cyrillic.  I somehow "knew" that this was true before, but now I can really understand why.  When I first started studying Crimean Tatar, I was surprised to find that I would often read words that were exactly the same or very close to the same in Turkish but not be able to understand them until I sounded them out.  It is much easier for me to read Crimean Tatar texts in Latin letters because my brain is familiar with many of the words and patterns from Turkish.  And indeed an ability of the Turkic speakers and the Crimean Tatar diaspora in Turkey to be able to easily read Crimean Tatar publications is one large influence in this discussion.  

So what is the future of the Crimean Tatar alphabet?  To close this post with an easy cliché, only time will tell.