Romanisation in Kazakhstan and beyond

A few years ago www.english-in-asia.blogspot.com (2012.12.26) reported on plans in Kazakhstan to switch from writing Kazakh in the Russian-based Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin-based Roman alphabet. This Central Asian nation now seems to be pushing ahead with those plans. 77 year-old President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled since independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, is especially keen on romanisation and put his National Commission for the Modernisation of Society in charge of it.

When countries choose a writing system for languages that were previously unwritten, or decide to change the existing system, there are usually political and economic reasons as well as linguistic and educational ones. It seems Nazarbayev would like to move away from Russian influence, even though Russian continues to be an official language alongside Kazakh and is still understood by most people. But in which direction does he want to go? One possibility is Turkey, another Muslim-majority nation in the region whose language is related to Kazakh. 

However, according to an article by Andrew Higgins in the New York Times (2018.1.15) Nazarbayev has rejected the diacritics (accents) used in Turkish because he thinks they would confuse Kazakhs when they learn English. And he wants people to be able to write Kazakh on a normal computer keyboard. By 'normal' he seems to mean an English-based one and his vision of modernisation puts English centre stage.

Of course there is no direct connection between the Roman alphabet and English. Most of the world's written languages today use some form of this alphabet, originally developed by the Romans for Latin, and English has had to make many adjustments for sounds not found in Latin, including the use of digraphs (e.g. t+h). Moreover, there is no need to know the Roman alphabet to use computers or smartphones. Thanks to technological advances such as the Unicode system, texts in more and more scripts can be sent from one computer and read on another. The Unicode Consortium is even debating how to make it easier to input emoji (see The Economist, 2017.12.18).

Despite technology, however, many people still associate modernisation and internationalisation with the Roman alphabet. At least 100 writing systems have yet to be encoded into Unicode. People who learned to use computers or mobile phones before their own language was supported by technology had to use Roman characters; they often continue to do so after their own script has become available. The great majority of the world's non-Roman writing systems are based in Asia, including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Myanmar, Sinhala, Tamil and Thai, and in total cover billions of people. 

But several Asian languages that used to be written in other scripts are now largely romanised, including Malay, Javanese and Turkish. Mongolians have traditionally used the Cyrillic alphabet in Mongolia and the Mongolian script in China, but more young people seem to be using Roman letters to write messages on social networks. Many Chinese and Japanese input text in Roman characters before software converts it into characters. And the use of rōmaji is expanding in texts and on public signs in Japan - for Japanese as well as for foreign words.

When the Chinese government authorised the use of Chinese characters in URLs, some feared this might be the beginning of a 'separate internet' that ran against the principle of global open access. However, John Yunker (writing on the Global Design website on January 2, 2006), reminded us that URLs can be encoded in such a way as to allow them to be read in both Chinese and ASCII characters and also concluded that Beijing had enough ways of controlling internet use without using Chinese characters as another restriction. The controversy nevertheless serves as a reminder that language planning nearly always has political dimensions. 

Developing writing systems is a branch of language planning known as corpus planning (which also involves developing dictionaries and grammars) and is crucial not only to extend educational and employment choices to people in remote areas but to preserve minority languages that may otherwise be lost. The Roman alphabet may seem a pragmatic choice as it is the mostly widely used script (just as English is the most widely used language and may be a good choice for a country's first foreign language). Roman letters may also make sense economically as the technology for writing them already exists. But we should not overlook the cultural and political preferences of language planners. Malays who prefer to write in Arabic letters are quite likely to favour stronger links with the rest of the Muslim world. Christian missionaries, who often bring education to remote parts of Asia for the first time, may be biased towards the Roman script because of a background in English or another European language. 

But from a purely linguistic point of view the Roman script is often not the best choice and even some Christian missionaries reject it in favour of newer systems that are easier to learn and better suited to the language in question. The syllabic writing system developed by American missionary Samuel Pollard in the 1930s was rapidly adopted by speakers of many of the Miao languages used in southern China and northern Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. Although influenced to some extent by English, it mostly draws on the scripts developed for Cree and other Native American and Canadian languages. One of the most successful of these is used for Inuktitut and related languages in northern Canada today.

Nowadays a writing system, in addition to phonology, vocabulary and grammar, is vital to learning a language, especially a second language, and requires time and effort to master. As technology advances the choice of writing systems may increase rather than decrease and the choice for language planners and language learners may become more complex. Is it better to learn a script that suits your own language best or one that can be understood more easily by speakers of other languages?