Now I Know My ABCs

You ever heard of an entire country changing its language, or specifically its writing system? It's been done before, in Turkey, Vietnam, etc, as they ditched their previous writing scripts for the Roman alphabet. Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet, again. It changed its alphabet from Cyrillic into Latin late last year, but it was met with some criticism. First of all, changing an entire system makes people unsettled, and it doesn't help that the new language looks uglier.

Which is why they are changing it once again, but of course they are smaller changes. Originally, the country was written as:

Қазақстан Республикасы. 

The first revision changed it to: 

Qazaqstan Respy’bli’kasy

And now, its:  

Qazaqstan Respýblıkasy

So now, everybody is happy because it doesn't look ugly. Oh wait. What was that? You mean it's going to be expensive? What do you mean?

In our modern age where there are more signs, more companies, more everything, it will be so much harder to change the language. But let's take a step back. Why this? Here's the thing: more Kazakhs know Russian than their true mother tongue. Ethnic Kazakhs constitute 2/3 of the population while 1/5 in Russian. However, about 94% of people speak Russian because of the Soviet Union, while 74% of people speak Kazakh. Obviously they want to shed their former dependence on the Soviet Union and try to step back onto the world stage. The government even put ads in America and around the world advertising how their country is changing. They want to Westernize and be closely aligned with the West. THey want to develop their culture and commit to their national identity.

Now we can look at the cost. It'll be about $664 million in educational programs, textbooks, classes, etc. That's not it though. This'll be a long road that will take years. The goal is to completely change by 2025. But think about businesses. That's a lot of sign changing. It sucks that people have already changed to the alphabet introduced in 2017 because now they have to do it again.

Turkey did it 90 years ago, but of course it was easier then because fewer people could read and write, and there wasn't too much to change.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180424-the-cost-of-changing-an-entire-countrys-alphabet