Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday night said the north is “ready” to transition to the new common Turkic alphabet.
Addressing the Organisation of Turkic States (OTS) summit in the Kyrgyz capital city Bishkek, he said the new alphabet will “unite the Turkic world”, and called on all OTS members to transition from their current alphabets to the new one.
“Turkey, Azerbaijan, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus are ready in this regard. It would be appropriate for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan to take the initiative to switch to the new alphabet,” he said.
Plans for a common Turkic alphabet have been suggested since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, with Azerbaijan having briefly adopted an earlier form of a common Turkic alphabet in December 1991.
However, the country then reformed its alphabet a year later, and has since used an alphabet of its own, with minor differences.
The initiative to introduce a common Turkic alphabet then gathered pace this year at a meeting of the Turkic World Common Alphabet Commission in Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku, where a consensus was reached on a 34-letter alphabet.
The alphabet contains all 29 letters which have been used in Turkish since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s reforms in 1928, plus five others.
Not everyone in the north was enamoured with Erdogan’s insistence that the north is ready to transition, however, with Turkish Cypriot Nicosia mayor Mehmet Harmanci issuing a sarcastic response on social media.
“It is a relief to know that we are ready for this, and education scientists and linguists will surely now receive the reward for all the academic studies they have been carrying out for days and months,” he began.
He added, “this magnificently planned and programmed development of this country’s education sector excites us all. Of course, the response to this will be, ‘are we removing letters from the alphabet, did you find it hard to add five new letters, you enemies of the state?’ You are super!”
