A video link to this story was originally posted in the Language subverse two month ago, but very few people go there, so I thought I would cross-post the story here.
In 2017, Kazakhstan's then president and long-term leader Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a decree on the switch from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. By 2025, everything in the country — from school textbooks and literature to street signs and official documents — will have to be quite literally rewritten. There is now a final Kazakh version of the Latin alphabet, with 32 letters — including nine letters that are uniquely Kazakh sounds.
According to state media, the government plans to spend around 218 billion tenge, around €505 million or $595 million, on the various stages of the transition. In April, the country's National Bank issued new "rewritten" coins. Part of the plan is to use code to digitally convert things written in Cyrillic to the Latin script. From 2021 the alphabet will be officially introduced to the public.
This will be the third time Kazakhstan has changed alphabets in the last 100 years. In 1929, Kazakhs switched from the Arabic script to the Latin script, as the Soviet Union pushed to create a secular education system. In 1940, Kazakhstan switched to the Cyrillic alphabet. Nationalities in the Soviet Union had the right to education in their own language, but the change was still supposed to create overall unity and is seen as a move towards "Russification."
Now Kazakhstan is trying to shed its Soviet past, albeit much later than many neighboring countries, where Turkic languages are also spoken. Azerbaijan switched from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet in 1991, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, while Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan made the change in 1993.
Kazakstan's move can also be seen as a step to distance from neighboring Russia as well, however. Kazakh authorities have been at pains to emphasize that Russia remains an important ally for the Central Asian country. Russia is one of Kazakhstan's top trade partners.
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[–] Jock_Sniffer [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Kazakhstan recognizes both Kazakh and Russian as their official languages. The Latinization will apply only to the Kazakh language. Cyrillic will still be used for Russian.
https://neweasterneurope.eu/2019/12/03/latinisation-of-the-kazakh-alphabet/