Latest / The Story of Uzbekistan: Silk Road Kingdoms and Soviet Legacy — Fexingo History / The Karakalpak Alphabet: How Four Scripts Erased a Culture
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the Aral Sea, the cotton, the Soviet economic machine. But there's another layer to the Karakalpak story that's less visible — and it's about their alphabet. Or should I say, alphabets. Luna: Wait, how many alphabets have they had? Lucas: Four in about seventy years. And each one was a kind of cultural earthquake. Before the 1920s, Karakalpak was written in the Arabic script — like most of Central Asia. But that changed when the Soviets began their Latinization campaign, part of a policy called korenizatsiya, or 'nativization'. Lucas: The idea was to create Latin-based alphabets for the many minority languages of the USSR, partly to boost literacy, partly to break ties with the Islamic world and its Arabic-script tradition. So in 1928, Karakalpak officially switched to a Latin alphabet. Luna: That must have been confusing for people who already knew how to read. Lucas: Absolutely. But that was just the start. Stalin soon changed course — he saw Latin alphabets as too 'Western' and wanted to unify the Soviet Union under a single script. So in 1940, just twelve years later, Karakalpak was forced to adopt a Cyrillic alphabet. Lucas: And not just any Cyrillic — a modified version that couldn't represent all the Karakalpak sounds properly. They had to use extra letters and digraphs. It was clunky. And then after that, in the 1950s, there was a minor reform that tinkered with it further. Luna: So every generation had to learn a new way to write. That's devastating for a culture. Lucas: It is. Imagine your grandparents' books — all in Arabic script — suddenly you can't read them. The whole literary heritage becomes inaccessible. The poet Berdaq, who wrote epic poems in the 19th century, is a key figure here. His works were originally in Arabic script, then republished in Latin, then in Cyrillic. Each republication created a slightly different version. Lucas: Today, schoolchildren in Karakalpakstan learn Berdaq's poems in Cyrillic. But the original manuscripts? They're in a museum in Nukus, and most young people can't decipher them. Meanwhile, the Latin script is making a comeback since independence in 1991, but it's a slow, politicized process. Luna: So they're effectively trying to learn a third script again. Is there resistance to the new Latin alphabet? Lucas: Yes, partly because people are exhausted. But also because the new Latin alphabet isn't the same as the 1928 one — it's based on the Turkish alphabet now, with a few tweaks. So it's yet another system. And the older generation, who were educated in Cyrillic, feel left out. There's a real fracture between age groups. Lucas: And it's not just about writing. The alphabet changes were tied to the destruction of the traditional education system. Before the Soviets, boys in Karakalpakstan — and some girls — learned to read in madrasas, using Arabic script to study the Quran and classical poetry. The Soviets closed those madrasas and replaced them with secular schools using Latin, then Cyrillic. Luna: So the old knowledge was actively stamped out. Lucas: Exactly. The script changes were a form of cultural erasure. And there's a fascinating detail: in some remote villages, elders continued to teach the Arabic alphabet in secret, in their homes, long after it was banned. They'd gather kids and say, 'You need to know this to read your history.' But that was rare. Lucas: There's also the story of the Karakalpak linguist who fought for the Latin alphabet in the 1920s, a man named Dzhokhar — not the Chechen, but a local scholar. He believed Latin would make Karakalpak more 'modern' and easier to learn. But he was purged in the 1930s, and his work was erased. Luna: So even the people who designed the alphabets ended up victims of the system. Lucas: Yes. And the irony is that the very idea of a 'national' Karakalpak alphabet was a Soviet construct. Before the 1920s, Karakalpak wasn't really a standardized written language. There were dialects, and people used either Chagatai or Persian for formal writing. So the Soviets actually created a written Karakalpak — but then they kept changing it. Lucas: Today, after independence, Uzbekistan as a whole has officially switched to a Latin alphabet, but the transition is slow and messy. In Karakalpakstan, the situation is even more complex because the republic has its own language policy. Signs are often in both Latin and Cyrillic, sometimes Arabic for tourism. It's a visible reminder of a century of alphabet wars. Luna: It sounds like the alphabet is a battlefield in miniature. Lucas: Exactly. And the casualties are cultural continuity, historical memory, and literacy itself. When you change the script, you don't just change how people write — you change how they relate to their past. For the Karakalpak, that's happened four times in living memory.