1928 Latinization Decree

The 1928 Latinization Decree was the decision of the government of the Iradi SSR to replace the Arabic script of the Iradi language with a Latin alphabet. It formed part of the all-Union Latinization campaign, in which most Turkic languages of the Soviet Union adopted alphabets based on the Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet (Yañalif) in the late 1920s. Iradi made the change in 1928, the same year as Kyrgyz.^[1]

The decree was carried out under the policy of korenizatsiia ("nativization"). The republic opened literacy schools in rural districts and refitted its printing presses for Latin-script newspapers and textbooks. Officials presented the reform as a way to raise literacy. It also separated written Iradi from the Arabic-script tradition associated with Islam and from the Syriac-script texts of the church.^[2] The Latin alphabet was replaced with Cyrillic in 1941 (see 1941 Cyrillic Mandate) and restored in 1992.

References

1. ^ Martin, Terry (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
2. ^ Talas State University Press (2011). Iradistan: A History of the Iradi SSR, 1925–1991. Talas, pp. 23–311.