ABSTRACT
The alphabets of Soviet Central Asia have been changed twice by the Soviet regime. At first the modified Arabic alphabet, in use since 1922, was discarded in favor of the Latin alphabet; then the Latin alphabet was dropped and replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet. Moscow justified the first reform on the grounds that the Arabic alphabet, even in its modified (phonetic) version, was too difficult to learn and was too easily identified with what was then called "the reactionary philosophy" of Islam. The Latin alphabet, on the other hand, being universal, would more effectively combat illiteracy. It would, moreover, facilitate the study of Central Asian languages as well as the translation of foreign books into these languages. Moscow also assumed that by adopting the Latin alphabet it could more easily control publications printed in local languages 1 and create a barrier between the new national literatures of the Central Asian republics and their common Chagatai source. 2 (Chagatai is the medieval literary language of all the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.)
