Turkic countries want Turkish alphabet to rediscover their identity

The process, promoted mainly by Erdogan's Turkey, received a further boost after the start of Putin's aggression against Ukraine. Language seen as the ultimate integrator of political and ideological significance.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - These days the Organisation of Turkic Countries (OPT), which involves Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, has decided to submit the issue of creating a single alphabet for joint discussion. According to Tatar political scientist Ruslan Ajsin, this is 'a long-awaited event, which the Turkish-speakers of the Russian Federation, and perhaps the much-persecuted Uyghurs of China, may join sooner or later', as he puts it in an article in Idel.Realii.

In recent years, mainly at the initiative of Ankara, a decisive process of rapprochement of the Turkic countries has been initiated, which received an additional boost after the start of Putin's aggression against Ukraine. The stakeholders have signed or promoted many strategic agreements and joint economic and humanitarian projects. Even the creation of a common army to guarantee the security of the region of Ottoman memory, and succeed in countering the pressures of the threatening northern neighbour.

The Turanian world is trying to rediscover its own common identity, at a time of the laboured collapse of the imperialisms of East and West and their colonial policies. As historian Lev Gumilev put it, the Moscow regime 'had tried in the last century to scatter the Turkic super-ethnos into several separate chambers, those of the Eurasian Soviet republics, in order to assert the principle of divide and rule'. This fragmentation also entailed a removal of the cultural and spiritual heritage and the spirit of fraternity of the Turkic peoples.

The alphabet itself was the symbolic instrument of this colonial operation. Within a generation, Moscow had changed the linguistic spelling twice: first by replacing Arabic with Latin letters, and shortly afterwards by imposing the Cyrillic alphabet, for the purpose of unification and Russification. The intelligentsia of these countries tried to oppose the imperial paradigm, but inertia imposed by force from the central power silenced all opposing voices, often through internment in camps.

As Ajsin recalls, 'a great Tatar intellectual of the late 19th century, Ismail Gaspraly, argued that unity comes from language, ideas and labour. Language is the ultimate integrator of political and ideological meaning, and no global collaborative project can succeed without a common language. The Turkic world today exceeds 300 million people, and a Turkic language based on a single alphabet, the so-called Yangalif, would become one of the most widespread idioms in the world.

The language would thus not only become the vehicle for the integration of the Turkic world, but would be the protective shield against the aggression of the 'Russian world'. The invasion of the Ukraine, the historian warns, 'began precisely with the motivation of defending the Russian-speaking population of that country, and similar statements have already resounded with regard to Kazakhstan'. It is the Soviet legacy of opposing the languages and cultures of peoples deemed 'lesser' than the dominant Russian one.

'Alone one does not survive,' Ajsin concludes, 'in the world of global communication, language becomes a decisive tool in political and ideological warfare. It is not just a matter of regulating a means of communication, but of working out a common vision of the world: 'the ancient Greeks believed that their language, the Logos, was both speech and thought, the key that opens the door to the human soul, reason and perception of the surrounding reality'. Only a man who speaks his native language can consider himself an authentic subject, not a member of an anonymous mass.