When Turkey switched from Arabic to Latin script in 1928, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk didn't just change how people wrote their shopping lists. He severed a nation's written connection to its Ottoman past and reoriented it toward a European future. The decision took effect in mere months, leaving millions functionally illiterate overnight in their own language.

This wasn't an efficiency upgrade. It was a political revolution disguised as educational reform. The Arabic script worked perfectly well for Turkish—as it had for centuries. But Atatürk understood something that linguists and policy makers still grapple with today: how a language is written carries meaning independent of what is written.

Writing systems are technologies, yes—but they're technologies freighted with history, religion, and identity. Every script choice signals affiliation. Every reform picks winners and losers. And in our current moment, as communities worldwide debate how their languages should appear on screens and street signs, these old battles are being fought with new urgency.

Writing systems function as boundary markers between communities in ways that spoken language often cannot. You might not immediately identify someone's religion or ethnicity from their accent, but the script on their storefront tells you instantly. This is why the same spoken language can be written in completely different scripts depending on who is doing the writing.

Serbo-Croatian offers the textbook case. Before Yugoslavia's dissolution, this was considered a single language written in two scripts: Cyrillic and Latin. Serbs generally used Cyrillic, associated with Orthodox Christianity and Slavic identity. Croats used Latin, linking them to Catholic Europe. Same words, same grammar—but the visual difference was unmistakable and politically charged.

Today, the scripts have become even more significant as identity markers. Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin are now officially separate languages, distinguished partly by which script is preferred or permitted in official contexts. The linguistic differences are minimal; the political differences are vast.

Hindi and Urdu present a similar case. These languages are mutually intelligible in conversation—a Hindi speaker and an Urdu speaker can chat without difficulty. But Hindi is written in Devanagari script, associated with Hindu religious texts, while Urdu uses a modified Arabic script, connecting it to Islamic tradition. The partition of British India mapped roughly onto this script divide, and the scripts continue to mark religious and national identity.

This phenomenon extends beyond major geopolitical conflicts. Smaller communities often maintain distinct scripts precisely because they signal difference. Yiddish, though Germanic, uses Hebrew letters—a constant visual reminder of Jewish distinctiveness. Armenian and Georgian scripts exist nowhere else in the world, serving as powerful symbols of cultural uniqueness even when few outsiders could identify them.

Takeaway

Writing systems aren't just tools for recording speech—they're badges of belonging that communicate identity at a glance, often saying more about who we are than the words themselves.

Script reforms rarely emerge from purely technical concerns. When governments change how a language is written, they're typically pursuing political goals: breaking with a colonial past, aligning with a new ideological bloc, or asserting control over a population's relationship to its own history.

The Soviet Union understood this deeply. As Moscow consolidated control over Central Asia, it systematically replaced Arabic-based scripts with Latin ones in the 1920s and 1930s, cutting populations off from Islamic religious texts and pre-revolutionary literature. Then, in a second wave, Latin gave way to Cyrillic—binding these peoples more tightly to Russian cultural dominance.

When these countries gained independence after 1991, script choice became an immediate political question. Azerbaijan switched to Latin. Turkmenistan followed. Uzbekistan began a prolonged transition. Kazakhstan announced in 2017 that it would adopt Latin by 2025. Each decision signaled orientation away from Moscow and toward Turkey, Europe, or a globalized modernity where Latin script dominates digital technology.

The consequences of such reforms are never evenly distributed. Older generations lose access to texts they grew up with. Teachers must be retrained. Libraries become repositories of unreadable material. Those who master the new script gain advantages in employment and education. Script reform is always, in effect, a redistribution of literacy—creating new elites and marginalizing others.

Romania's nineteenth-century shift from Cyrillic to Latin illustrates how script can rewrite national mythology. The change emphasized Romanian's Latin origins and downplayed centuries of Slavic cultural influence. It wasn't that Cyrillic couldn't represent Romanian sounds—it had done so for hundreds of years. But Latin script made a claim about where Romania belonged.

Takeaway

Every script reform creates winners who gain access to new opportunities and losers who find their hard-won literacy suddenly devalued—making alphabet changes one of the most consequential policy decisions a government can make.

Script controversies aren't relics of twentieth-century nationalism. They're intensifying as digital technology, migration, and cultural politics collide. The stakes remain high because the underlying issues—identity, access, and power—haven't gone away.

Mongolia's recent attempt to restore traditional Mongolian script alongside Cyrillic has stumbled repeatedly. The vertical script, displaced by Soviet-era Cyrillicization, carries nationalist symbolism and connects Mongolians to their pre-communist heritage. But decades of Cyrillic education mean most citizens can't read it. Official deadlines keep slipping as the practical challenges mount.

In India, script politics intersects with caste, religion, and regional autonomy. Demands for the Santali language to be written in Ol Chiki script rather than Devanagari or Bengali represent Indigenous Santal claims to cultural distinctiveness. The script, invented in the 1920s specifically for Santali, has become a symbol of Santal identity in ways that borrowed scripts cannot replicate.

Digital technology has added new dimensions to these struggles. Unicode inclusion determines which scripts can be typed, displayed, and searched. Communities whose scripts aren't well-supported find their languages effectively excluded from the internet. Conversely, digital standardization sometimes forces compromises—variant script traditions consolidated into single computer-friendly versions.

Chinese script debates have intensified in unexpected ways. While the simplified characters introduced by the People's Republic remain dominant on the mainland, traditional characters persist in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and diaspora communities. The difference has become politically charged, with traditional characters signaling opposition to Beijing's cultural authority and simplified characters marking alignment with mainland standards.

Takeaway

In the digital age, script choice determines not just cultural identity but technological visibility—making the question of how a language appears on screens a matter of survival for linguistic communities worldwide.

Script choice is never a merely technical decision. Every alphabet, every character set, every reform encodes assumptions about who a community is and who it wants to become. The letters on a page or screen don't just represent sounds—they position speakers within historical, religious, and political networks.

For policy makers and cultural advocates, this means script decisions deserve the same careful analysis as any other major political choice. Who gains? Who loses? What historical connections are strengthened or severed? What futures become more or less possible?

Understanding script politics also offers broader insight into how linguistic practices shape social organization. When we recognize that even something as apparently neutral as an alphabet carries political weight, we become better equipped to analyze the full range of ways that language shapes—and is shaped by—power.