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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 o
by Mediterraneo10 5y ago
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.
- thedudeabides5 5y agoSounds pretty imperialistic for an ideology based on anti-imperialism.
- cooper12 5y ago> 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.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoNo, 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.