Latinisation in the Soviet Union


In the USSR, latinisation or latinization was the name of the campaign during the 1920s–1930s which aimed to replace traditional writing systems for all languages of the Soviet Union with systems that would use the Latin script or to create Latin-script based systems for languages that, at the time, did not have a writing system.

History

Background

Since at least 1700, Russian intellectuals have sought to Latinise the Russian language in their desire for close relations with the West.
The early 20th-century Bolsheviks had four goals: to break with Tsarism, to spread socialism to the whole world, to isolate the Muslim inhabitants of the Soviet Union from the Arabic-Islamic world and religion, and eradicate illiteracy through simplification. They concluded the Latin alphabet was the right tool to do so, and after seizing power during the Russian Revolution of 1917, they made plans to realise these ideals. Although progress was slow at first, in 1926 the Turkic-majority republics of the Soviet Union adopted the Latin script, giving a major boost to reformers in neighbouring Turkey. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk adopted the new Turkish Latin alphabet in 1928, this in turn encouraged the Soviet leaders to proceed.

Procedure

Almost all Turkic, Iranian, Uralic and several other languages were romanised, totaling nearly 50 of the 72 written languages in the USSR. There also existed plans to romanise Russian and other Slavic languages as well, but in the late 1930s the latinisation campaign was cancelled and all newly romanised languages were converted to Cyrillic.
In 1929 the People's Commissariat of the RSFSR formed a committee to develop the question of the romanisation of the Russian alphabet, led by Professor N. F. Yakovlev and with the participation of linguists, bibliographer, printers, and engineers. The Commission completed its work in mid-January 1930. However, on 25 January 1930, General Secretary Joseph Stalin ordered to halt the development of the question of the romanisation of the Cyrillic alphabet for the Russian language.
The following languages were romanised or adapted new Latin-script alphabets:
  1. Abaza
  2. Abkhaz
  3. Adyghe
  4. Altai
  5. Assyrian
  6. Avar
  7. Azerbaijani
  8. Balochi
  9. Bashkir
  10. Bukhori
  11. Buryat
  12. Chechen
  13. Chinese
  14. Chukchi
  15. Crimean Tatar
  16. Dargin
  17. Dungan
  18. Eskimo
  19. Even
  20. Evenki
  21. Ingrian
  22. Ingush
  23. Itelmen
  24. Kabardian
  25. Kalmyk Oirat
  26. Karachay-Balkar
  27. Karakalpak
  28. Karelian
  29. Kazakh
  30. Ket
  31. Khakas
  32. Khanty
  33. Komi
  34. Koryak
  35. Krymchak
  36. Kumandin
  37. Kumyk
  38. Kurdish
  39. Kyrgyz
  40. Lak
  41. Laz
  42. Lezgin
  43. Mansi
  44. Moldovan
  45. Nanai language
  46. Nenets languages
  47. Nivkh language
  48. Nogai language
  49. Ossetic language
  50. Persian alphabet
  51. Sami language
  52. Selkup language
  53. Shor language
  54. Shughni language
  55. Tabasaran language
  56. Tajik alphabet
  57. Talysh language
  58. Tat language
  59. Tatar language
  60. Tsakhur language
  61. Turkmen alphabet
  62. Udege language
  63. Udi language
  64. Uyghur language
  65. Uzbek language
  66. Vepsian language
Projects were created and approved for the following languages:
  1. Aleut language
  2. Arabic language
  3. Korean language
  4. Russian language
  5. Udmurt language
  6. Ukrainian language
Of these remaining 6, only Aleut was romanised, making the total 67.