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.

Bizim prezidentimiz

 According to a statement by the Mejlis, or Crimean Tatar Parliment, most Crimean Tatars voted for Timoshenko in the first round of the election, then followed by Tigipko, Yushenko, Yatseniuk and Hrytsenko.  The Mejlis voted to support Timoshenko for this round.  


Given that there are around 270,000 Crimean Tatars living in Crimea, it is an important voting block, and one that Yanukovich seems to be not to successful with.

In an attempt to capture some of these votes from Timoshenko, the Yanukovich campaign has apparently printed 70,000 leaflets in Crimean Tatar for distribution in Crimea.  While mud-slinging is certainly nothing new or unique to this presidential election, I was a bit surprised when I read this leaflet online (yes, unfortunately online!  I've yet to get my hands on one). 

Here's a photo of the leaflet from the above news story, and then my partial translation:

DEAR VOTERS!

On February 7th, the 2nd tour of the presidential election will take place.
We will decide who to vote for, Victor Yanukovich or Yulia Timoshenko.  Victor Yanukovich is a very experienced politician and leader.
...
Yulia Timoshenko is a politician who does not fulfill her promises, and is connected with the crisis and lies.  
To vote for her is to bring harm upon yourself.
With her politics, and under her care, Ukraine will be destroyed.
With her, Ukraine sunk into debt.  Each newborn is $1,000 in debt to foreign creditors.


Yanukovich          and       Timoshenko
This is good              and        evil.
This is brightness    and       darkness


Yanukovich is the only candidate who will save us!


YANUKOVICH - OUR PRESIDENT!

The Yanukovich campaign also published some materials in Crimean Tatar for the first round.  The Yanukovich symbol, which has his name and the words "Our President - 2010" superimposed over a map of Ukraine, here reads "Bizim prezident" in Crimean Tatar instead of the "Nash prezident" usually seen in Russian.  Ukrainia dlya lyudei (Ukraine for the people) has become Ukraina halk ichiun.

This is an interesting move.  There are very few Crimean Tatars who cannot read Russian, so printing pamphlets in Crimean Tatar is not an attempt to reach out to voters who haven't been exposed to advertisements.  In fact the NR2 article indicates that many Crimean Tatars are annoyed with the publications since many cannot read the language.  

Crimean Tatar Newspapers

Image taken from Flickr user ob124

Over the past few days a story about Crimean Tatar newspapers has been circulating on Eurasia blogs. The topic is the gradual disappearance of internet editions of Crimean Tatar newspapers, written about a few days ago on an English language Crimean Tatar listserv and then picked up by Paul Goble in a very interesting article at Window on Eurasia.

The decline of these online editions means, among other things, that Crimean Tatar diasporas lose an essential link to the happenings in Crimea. Many of the newspapers or news outlets publish at least partially in Crimean Tatar, so these diasporas are also cut off from Crimean Tatar language publications, of which the internet has few.

It seems trivial to compare this to my own experience, but I can't help thinking about how much I depend on American news sources and, of course, English language news.  Yes, there is little chance of escaping news about my fellow Americans, or having a lack of internet material to read in English, but I can certainly relate to the importance of online editions to those living far from home. What would I do without my Google Reader feeds and my daily fix of cruising the front pages of my favorite newspapers? Of course in this case the situation is much more sobering than missing out on a news fix with your morning coffee.

Of course it is not just diasporas affected by the loss of online newspapers.  In former Soviet countries internet publications have played an especially important role in the development of the press.  Online news sources, for example, are also frequently listed as an important force in the time leading up to the Orange Revolution.  Goble concludes the article by remarking:

The death of a newspaper is always a tragedy, but the demise of Internet papers from places like Crimea is an even greater one, not only because of the continuing crisis there but also because it serves as a warning to those who believed that the Internet would change everything by giving those who had been kept silent a way of speaking to the world.

I suppose I will also close on that note.