REWRITING ALPHABET, KAZAKH LEADER LOOKS TO LEAVE HIS MARK

President Nursultan Nazarbayev has intervened in the nation’s passionate debate over a new script, but his proposed solution is controversial

In his 26 years as Kazakhstan’s first and only president, Nursultan Nazarbayev has managed to keep a resurgent Russia at bay and navigate the treacherous geopolitical waters around Moscow, Beijing and Washington, keeping on good terms with all three capitals.

The authoritarian leader’s talent for balancing divergent interests, however, suddenly seems to have deserted him over an issue that, at first glance, involves neither great power rivalry nor weighty matters of state: the role of the humble apostrophe in writing down Kazakh words.

The Kazakh language is currently written using a modified version of Cyrillic, a legacy of Soviet rule, but Mr Nazarbayev announced in May that the Russian alphabet would be dumped in favour of a new script based on the Latin alphabet. This, he said, “is not only the fulfillment of the dreams of our ancestors, but also the way to the future for younger generations”.

The decision, however, raised a tricky issue: how to write down a tongue that has no alphabet of its own but has always used scripts imported from outside.

The president’s ardent intervention in Kazakhstan’s passionate debate over a new script and his proposed solution — he wants lots and lots of apostrophes — has highlighted how virtually everything in this former Soviet land, no matter how small or obscure, hinges on the will of a single 77-year-old man, or at least those who claim to speak for him.

“This is the basic problem of our country: If the president says something or just writes something on a napkin, everybody has to applaud,” said Aidos Sarym, a political analyst and member of a language reform commission set up last year.

Mr Nazarbayev, he added, deserves credit for turning Kazakhstan into the most stable and prosperous country in a region that has been battered by political upheaval and economic decay. But language, Mr Sarym noted, “is a very delicate sphere that cannot be dictated by officials”.

As in many newly independent countries struggling to create a sense of national identity after subjugation by a foreign power, language in Kazakhstan is a highly sensitive issue. Many people here, including ethnic Kazakhs, still often speak Russian.

But since emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union as an independent country in 1991, Kazakhstan has steadily chipped away at the legacy of Moscow’s political and cultural hegemony. It has replaced Russian with Kazakh as the main language of education and government, put English on a par with Russian in foreign language teaching and produced a torrent of Kazakh-language films and television programmes that celebrate the country’s culture and long-vanished nomadic traditions.

The shift to the Latin alphabet, to be completed by 2025, has been widely cheered as a long overdue assertion of the country’s full independence from Russia — and its determination to join the wider world. The main objections have come from the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow and ethnic Russians living in Kazakhstan.

Far less popular, however, has been a decision by the president in October to ignore the advice of specialists and announce a system that uses apostrophes to designate Kazakh sounds that don’t exist in other languages written in the standard Latin script.

The Republic of Kazakhstan, for example, will be written in Kazakh as Qazaqstan Respy’bli’kasy.

In a country where almost nobody challenges the president publicly, Mr Nazarbayev has found his policy on apostrophes assailed from all sides.

Linguists, who had recommended that the new writing system follow the example of Turkish, which uses umlauts and other phonetic markers instead of apostrophes, protested that the president’s approach would be ugly and imprecise.

“Nobody knows where he got this terrible idea from,” said Timur Kocaoglu, a professor of international relations and Turkish studies at Michigan State, who visited Kazakhstan last year. “Kazakh intellectuals are all laughing and asking: How can you read anything written like this?”

The proposed script, he said, “makes your eyes hurt”.

The uproar is testing the limits of Mr Nazarbayev’s approach to government: He brooks no opposition but is also keenly attuned to the public mood. Signalling a possible willingness to change course, an influential ally of the president, the head of the Senate, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, said last month that it was “still too early” to start using apostrophes in newspapers and elsewhere because “a final decision” had not yet been made.

After leading Kazakhstan to independence, Mr Nazarbayev, concerned with a backlash from the country’s large ethnic Russian population, stalled on demands from nationalists for a swift revival of the Latin script. Other newly independent countries with similar Turkic languages such as Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan all stopped using Cyrillic, but they had far smaller Russian populations.

“We all wanted to create our own states and our own cultures to help us escape from the