Belarus, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan… What the post-Soviet countries are doing about changing the alphabet. Paradoxically, Ukraine – after Russian aggression – no longer needs this.
Russia – whether Tsarist, Soviet or contemporary – based its unity, among other things, on the spread of the Russian language. And if it allowed other languages, it preferred them to be written in Cyrillic. Today, for the countries of Central Asia, moving away from the Cyrillic alphabet is a way of breaking away from Russian domination. Some oppositionists in Belarus also think the same way.
Of the Slavic nations using the Cyrillic, it is the Belarusians who have made the most – and most successful – attempts to introduce the Latin alphabet. Belarusian Latin has existed for a long time. It is largely based on the alphabet created by Jan Hus, a writing system adapted to Slavonic languages, especially Czech; it also introduces the letter ‘ŭ’, which is also used in Esperanto and the transcription of several other languages. In short, in Belarusian it usually replaces the letter ‘w’ used in Russian. This is particularly evident in the case of surnames – Kovalov in Russian, Kovaloŭ in Belarusian; Ivanov in Russian, Ivanoŭ in Belarusian.
In 1853, a decree was issued in the Russian Empire forbidding the publication of texts in the “Latin-Polish” alphabet, i.e. in Latsinka. But not much later, in 1862-63, a team led by Konstanty Kalinowski, the organiser of the January Uprising in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, published the periodical “Mużyckaja prauda” (“Peasant Truth”). It was branded by “Jaśko haspadar z pad Wilni” (“Jaśko the farmer from under Vilnius”). At the beginning of the 20th century, the two Belarusian periodicals “Nasha Dola” and “Nasha Niva” were published in two versions – in Cyrillic and Latin.
But then Latsinka disappeared. In the Second Polish Republic, Belarusians feared that the “Latinised” Belarusian language would become polonised, and the USSR authorities feared the divergence of Belarusian from Russian. Moreover, Belarusian was then subjected to changes leading to a kind of Russification. In 1933, a language reform was introduced, creating a language popularly known as “narkamouka”, from the word “Saŭnarkom”, an abbreviation for the Council of People’s Commissars, i.e. the government of the Belarusian SSR (People’s Commissar was the Bolshevik name for a minister).
Over the following years, Belarus was systematically russified. Achieving independence did not change the situation much. When Alexander Lukashenko, who knows Belarusian but speaks Russian on a daily basis, came to power, the Russification process was restarted. Only 53 per cent of the country’s citizens considered Belarusian to be their mother tongue in 2009, and only 23 per cent spoke it at home.
Belarusian was spoken mainly in the countryside and was also used by the anti-Lukashenko opposition. In recent years, many people have demonstratively switched away from Russian to show their opposition to dictatorial rule. And recently, the independent Nasha Niva portal created a version of its pages in the Latin alphabet. It should be added that the weekly “Nasha Niva” was closed down by the authorities in Minsk several years ago and its editors were repressed. The online content published by the portal is considered to be “extremist”…
Let us take a look at an exemplary (and dramatic in content) article on the portal, dedicated to the sentence received in a Belarusian court by human rights defender and Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski. Titled: “10 hadoŭ. Vyniesieny prysud nobieleŭskamu łaŭreatu Alesiu Bialackamu” – means simply “10 years. Punishment for Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski has been pronounced”.
And the very beginning of the text: “Suddzia Maryna Zapaśnik vyniesła siońnia žorstkija prysudy pravaabaroncam «Viasny» za ich pravaabarončuju dziejnaść”, i.e. “Judge Maryna Zapaśnik ruled today a harsh punishment for human rights defenders from «Viasna» for their activities in defence of human rights”. Of course, our languages differ, but it is quite easy for a Pole to understand Belarusian Latin.
As explained on the pages of “Nasha Niva”, the Latsinka used in the article resembles “its classical variant as used in the 20th century”. The texts are translated into Latin using a computer algorithm. Of course, “Nasha Niva” is not enough to talk about any kind of breakthrough. If we want to Latinise the language, it would be necessary to popularise it in Belarus first…
Kazakh Latin alphabet
However, work on the latinisation of the Kazakh language is advanced. The Kazakh literary language was not established until the 18th century, and the heyday of Kazakh literature was the 20th century.
This was brought to an end by the Stalinist terror – the most important creators of Kazakh culture were then accused of nationalism and of attempting to separate Kazakhstan from the USSR. Kazakhstan was treated as an area for intensive colonisation and, at the same time, as a place of exile – before the Second World War, it was here that thousands of Poles from Ukraine and Germans from the Volga region were sent, and a gigantic gulag system was created.
The revival of the Kazakh language started only with Kazakhstan’s independence in 1991. Kazakh replaced Russian as the main language of instruction, and Kazakh-language films and television programmes related to the country’s local culture and traditions were widely promoted.
Read the remainder here.
– translated by jz
© Telewizja Polska S.A
00-999 Warszawa ul. J.P. Woronicza 17