ABSTRACT
After the two world wars, genocide, massive ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation, in today’s Central Europe the frontiers of nation-states overwhelmingly overlap with language borders (see Map 33). The written and oral use of one national-cum-official standard language typically stops at the state frontier, while another national-cum-official standard language is in exclusive employment on the other side of a given frontier. A similar overlap was achieved between the region’s nation-states and their official scripts (writing systems). Unlike in the case of the official languages, the region’s scripts are not claimed as “national,” with the lone exception of the Greek alphabet. To a degree, resurgent Russia, with its traditional PanSlavism now reinvented as the novel ideology of Russkii Mir (Russian World) has attempted to claim Cyrillic as the Russian national alphabet since 2014. However, this claim is contradicted and denied by the use of Cyrillic for writing and publishing in numerous languages across Eurasia, including Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and Ukrainian in Central Europe. On the other hand, Moscow’s insistence on the national ownership of Cyrillic in the post-Soviet space is strengthened by the replacement of this script with the Latin alphabet for writing and publishing in Azerbaijani, Turkmen, and Uzbek, the national-cum-official languages of the ethnolinguistic nation-states of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, respectively. Furthermore, in 2017 Kazakhstan announced that by 2025 the Latin alphabet would have superseded Cyrillic for writing and publishing in the nation-state’s national and official language of Kazakh. As a result, beginning in the mid-2020s, few post-Soviet states will employ Cyrillic in official capacity, perhaps, only Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine. In accordance with the ideology of Russian World, the Kremlin considers Belarus and Ukraine as part of Russia’s “true” Orthodox historic ethno-cultural space (Lebensraum?), which in the eyes of some Russians makes Cyrillic appear to be a “Russian alphabet.”
