From Cyrillic to Latin
Script reform in Kazakhstan and the fate of the digital library
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
Within a single century Kazakh has changed its script three times: it was written in the Arabic script until the late 1920s, then in Latin, and from 1940 in Cyrillic. Presidential Decree No. 569 of 26 October 2017 began a renewed transition to Latin. The first alphabet, which marked Kazakh-specific letters with apostrophes, met wide criticism and was revised by a new decree a few months later. The deadline for completing the change has also moved from 2025 to later years.
Public debate has centred on the political symbolism of the decision: moving away from Russia, moving closer to the Turkic-speaking world. This poster takes up a quieter question: what should be done with the millions of pages of books, newspapers and documents already digitised in Cyrillic? Libraries are caught between two paths. One is to convert every text automatically into Latin, which produces errors and hides the original. The other is to keep two separate archives, one of which the new generation will never know. Meanwhile the Kazakhs of China still write in the Arabic script, and their writing has no place in either archive.
Our proposal is to treat the script as the form in which a work is displayed, not as its identity. Each work has a stable identifier, and its Cyrillic, Latin and Arabic-script versions are displays of one and the same thing. Readers choose the script they read, and the original always remains available. This is the principle on which language-agnostic knowledge is built: script and language may change without the knowledge itself being lost.
Findings
- Automatic Cyrillic-to-Latin conversion fails most often on proper names and loanwords, and these errors multiply across the library catalogue.
- None of the libraries we examined had created machine-readable links between the two script versions of the same work.
- Kazakh writing in the Arabic script, especially from China, is almost absent from national digitisation programmes.
References
Decree of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan No. 569, "On the transition of the Kazakh alphabet from Cyrillic to the Latin script", 26 October 2017.
Al Jazeera. 2017. "Kazakhstan to switch from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet." 28 October 2017.
The Conversation. 2017. "Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet – here's why."