The process is mainly promoted by Turkey, ruled by Erdogan, and received a new impetus after the start of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. Language is seen as the integrating element par excellence, with a political and ideological meaning.
Moscow () – These days, the Organization of Turkish States (OTS), in which Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan participate, have decided to submit the issue of creating a single alphabet to a joint debate. According to the Tatar political scientist Ruslan Ajsin, this is “a long-awaited event, to which the Turkish-speakers of the Russian Federation, and perhaps the much-persecuted Uyghurs of China, could join sooner or later”, as he states in an article published in Idel.Realii.
In recent years, mainly at the initiative of Ankara, an intense process of rapprochement of the Turkic countries has begun, which received an additional boost after the start of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. The stakeholders have signed or promoted numerous strategic agreements and joint economic and humanitarian projects. A common army has even been created to guarantee the security of the region of Ottoman memory, and manage to counteract the pressures of the threatening neighbor to the north, or avoid the spiral of globalization.
The Turkic world tries to rediscover its own common identity, at a time when the imperialisms of East and West and their colonial policies are crumbling. As the historian Lev Gumilev put it, the Moscow regime “had tried in the last century to disperse the Turkic-speaking super-ethnicity into several separate chambers, those of the Eurasian Soviet republics, in order to enforce the principle of divide and rule.” This fragmentation also meant the elimination of the cultural and spiritual heritage and the spirit of brotherhood of the Turkic peoples.
The alphabet itself was the symbolic instrument of this colonial operation. Within a generation, Moscow twice changed the script of the language: first by substituting Arabic letters for Latin ones, and soon after by imposing the Cyrillic alphabet, with the aim of unifying and Russifying. The intelligentsia of these countries tried to oppose the imperial paradigm, but the central power was impassive and resorted to force to silence the opposing voices. In many cases, those who opposed ended up in concentration camps.
As Ajsin recalls, “a great Tartar intellectual of the late nineteenth century, Ismail Gaspraly, argued that unity comes from language, ideas and work. Language is the integrating element par excellence, of political and ideological significance, and no global collaboration project can be successful without a common language The Turkic world today exceeds 300 million people: so a Turkic language based on a single alphabet, the so-called Yangalifwould become one of the most widespread languages in the world.
Thus, the language would not only become the vehicle for the integration of the Turkic world, but it would also be the protective shield against the aggression of the “Russian world”. The invasion of Ukraine, warns the historian, “began precisely with the motivation of defending the Russian-speaking population of that country, and similar statements have already resounded regarding Kazakhstan.” It is the Soviet heritage of rejecting the languages and cultures of the peoples considered “lesser” than the dominant Russian.
“You can’t survive alone,” concludes Ajsin. “In the world of global communication, language becomes a decisive tool in political and ideological warfare,” concludes Ajsin. It is not just about regulating a means of communication, but about developing 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 of the human soul, reason and the perception of the surrounding reality”. Only a man who speaks his native language can be considered a true subject, not a member of an anonymous mass.
