1941 Cyrillic Mandate

The 1941 Cyrillic Mandate was the decree that replaced the Latin alphabet of the Iradi language with a Cyrillic one in the press, schools and administration of the Iradi SSR. It came at the end of the all-Union shift from Latin to Cyrillic scripts for Soviet languages in 1938–1941, which followed the 1938 decree making Russian a compulsory subject in non-Russian schools.^[1] Like the Kyrgyz alphabet adopted in 1940, the Iradi Cyrillic alphabet added letters such as ө, ү and ң for sounds absent from Russian.^[2]

Cyrillic remained the script of Iradi for half a century, until the territorial authorities restored the Latin alphabet in 1992 (revised in 1995 and 1997; see 1995 Latin Orthography Revision). Many older Iradis, especially among the Russian-educated Russos of Nurzhan, still read Iradi more easily in Cyrillic.

References

1. ^ Grenoble, Lenore A. (2003). Language Policy in the Soviet Union. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
2. ^ Talas State University Press (2023). Descriptive Grammar of the Iradi Language, pp. 112–148.