Languages – Turks, Kurds and three letters of the alphabet

The Turkish Government proposes legalising the letters q, w, and x.

Among the negotiations presently underway between the Turkish government and the country’s Kurdish minority is a curious orthographic reform. The proposal – to expand the current alphabet by adding the letters q, x and w – is part of a ‘democratisation package’ announced by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during a live TV press conference last September. Since then, the minor reform has been submitted to parliament. The news puzzled some Western commentators, who wondered how important discussions over the alphabet could really be.

And why this should be a matter for government and parliament. Or what bearing it has on Turkey’s Kurdish question. Yet, in Turkey, discussions over the alphabet have always been important. Indeed, the father of the modern republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, personally championed an earlier spelling reform, heralding the country’s move to the Latin alphabet after centuries of using an adapted Arabic script for written Turkish.

This was the traditional solution adopted by languages spoken in the Islamic world that differed from Arabic: e.g., in Iran and Pakistan, respectively, Persian and Urdu are still today written in an Arabic script expanded with diacritical marks.

If you want to read it all, purchase the entire issue in pdf for just three euro