UPDATE: Map may not be entirely accurate, see Nathan’s comment.
As per TDAXP Dan’s request:
Click for the full image.
Here’s where it gets interesting: what script do Uzbeks learn in Afghanistan, or the Turkmens in Iraq and Iran? What about Azeri’s in Iran? Tajikstan’s Dari and Iran’s Farsi language are supposed to be the same, but Dari is now written in Cyrillic and Farsi in modified Persian-Arabic. And what about Tajiks in Afghanistan?
Read more about Turkic languages here, while a less state-specific map of the Turkic languages can be see here. You might also like Wikipedia’s map of the Persian language.
Central Asia expert Nathan is (of course) correct that the Central Asian Turkic languages did use Turkey’s Latin script for several years under Stalin. In “Dust of Empire,” Karl Meyer wrote that Soviet authorities worried that this would encourage Pan-Turanism, hence the move to Cyrillic.
About Curzon
Lord George Nathaniel Curzon (1859 - 1925) entered the British House of Commons as a Conservative MP in 1886, where he served as undersecretary of India and Foreign Affairs. He was appointed Viceroy of India at the turn of the 20th century where he delineated the North West Frontier Province,
ordered a military expedition to Tibet, and unsuccessfully tried to partition the province of Bengal during his six-year tenure. Curzon served as Leader of the House of Lords in Prime Minister Lloyd George's War Cabinet and became Foreign Secretary in January 1919, where his most famous act was
the drawing of the Curzon Line between a new Polish state and Russia. His publications include
Russia in Central Asia (1889) and
Persia and the Persian Question (1892).
In real life, "Curzon" is a US citizen from the East Coast who has been a financial analyst, freelance translator, and university professor; he is currently on assignment in Tokyo.
Xinjiang has an interesting little history with cyrillic and latin scripts. The PRC took cues from the USSR on language policy before the Sino-Soviet split. In 1956 Cyrillic Uyghur was made official, abandoned in 1957, then made official again. Paradoxically, they also copied the Soviet standard for Arabic-based Uyghur script in 1951. Clearly no one really knew what was going on. A Latin-based, or more precisely Chinese pinyin-based, script was instituted in the 1970s with the Cultural Revolution. During both of these phases a great deal of print media was in whatever the official script was at the time, yet Arabic-based Uyghur script chugged right along.
One result of all this is that older Uyghur people occasionally know the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, though I’ve never met an older Uyghur who couldn’t read the Arabic-based script.
Thank you — what a messy century the Turkic languages had. I’m thus surmising the written language de/evolution went like this:
Turkish: Arabic -> Latin
Azeri: Arabic -> Latin -> Cyrillic -> Latin
Kazakh/Uzbek/Kyrgyz/Tatar: Arabic -> Latin -> Cyrillic
Uyghur: Arabic -> Cyrillic -> Arabic -> Cyrillic -> Pinyin/Latin -> Arabic
Interesting… “Capitalized Phrases” is on the Amazon.com page, but not Statistically Improbable Phrases… From the about page:
So apparently CAPs is seperate from SIPs, but then why is SIPs there are CAPs not?
And not just Cyrillic, but very different Cyrillic alphabets. I can kind of get written Kyrgyz and Kazakh, but I’m not entirely sure what sounds the vowels make.
On the map, I’d at least put Uzbekistan as a mix of blue and green. Even when I was there, Latin signs were fairly common and like I said, some kids couldn’t read Cyrillic.
Dari’s written in Arabic script. Tajik, however, is written in Cyrillic (but I think they’re supposed to be switching to Latin).
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I noticed that you hadn’t got Afghanistan Uzbek sorted yet. Uzbeks in Afghanistan write using the Persian version of the Arabic alphabet. However, because they do not generally have the funding to make their own textbooks, Uzbek is usually considered a spoken-only language, and their education (if they get any at all) is in Dari.
Uzbeks in Tajikistan still use the Cyrillic script, even in the Uzbek-language schools, by the way. I’ve met many Uzbek adults in Uzbekistan who can’t read the Latin letters, but this is getting less and less common. I think the government only lets out one or two newspapers in Cyrillic, mainly for the old people.
Tajikistan was supposed to switch to Latin, but then they saw how much it cost Uzbekistan (just think of the libraries!!!) and I’m fairly sure they’ve put it off for a decade, at least. This decision was also strengthened by the fact that there is no Persian-speaking country that uses the Latin-based alphabet.