In Baku in September 2024, the Council of Elders of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) adopted a unified alphabet of thirty-four letters based on Latin script. In Bishkek, at the November OTS summit, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan declared: “Our common alphabet is a symbol of our shared destiny, our common future.” In Almaty, in October, in front of Turan University, a statue of Princess Turandot from Gozzi’s famous play was unveiled. The university administration assured everyone that whoever rubs the slipper of the Daughter of Turan will receive her blessing and feel inspired. So I did: I rubbed the slipper of the Daughter of Turan and inspiration carried me toward a future Turan.
Critical Mass
Under modern market conditions, not only the economy but everything related to language—media, education, the film industry, television, literature, show business, video games, and websites—develops according to market principles. As a result, all linguistic content becomes a commodity and requires mass production and a mass audience. In this context, the primary goal of most publishers and producers is to ensure profitability (or at least cover production costs). They are not interested in promoting low-circulation, low-profit, or unprofitable content. When the audience (or readership) is small, authors also fail to receive adequate compensation. Thus, the most talented individuals either migrate to countries with larger audiences or switch to more widely spoken languages.
Take, for instance, the long list of Kazakh, Kyrgzh, and other Central Asian artists who have left their mother tongues behind in favor of languages with the largest market audiences. Classical Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov and Kazakhstani poet and cultural researcher Olzhas Suleimenov wrote in Russian. Contemporary Kazakhstani writer Dauren Sugralinov now lives and works in the United States. The Kazakhstani director Timur Bekmambetov rose to fame in Russia and is now making waves in Hollywood. Kazakhstani rapper Skriptonite has conquered Moscow, while Kazakhstani singer Dimash Kudaibergen is celebrated in China.
In physics, there is a concept of “critical mass.” A chain reaction of nuclear fission—an atomic explosion—is only possible if the mass of uranium’s nuclear isotopes exceeds a critical threshold (ranging from 10 to 50 kg, depending on the isotope). By analogy, for the self-sufficient development of a culture and a language—by which I mean actual growth, not just survival—the population must exceed a certain critical mass. As mentioned earlier, commercial interest is a powerful driver of creativity. However, if a population is below the “critical mass” threshold, investors see little incentive to develop and commercialize content. This applies not only to cultural production but also to activities such as translating books in a timely manner or dubbing films and video games. Without these interconnected bridges to global languages, full-fledged development becomes difficult, and a smaller language is doomed to stagnation, relegated to household and private communication.
For example, large-scale business and science ventures have all transitioned to English. Beyond commerce and science, we are also seeing the rapid development of English-language art, with a potential market of nearly 2 billion consumers. A similar phenomenon is playing out in China (1.5 billion consumers), India (1.4 billion), and Brazil (216 million).
Although it is difficult to nail down exact results, an estimate of the ten most-used languages on the Internet is revealing:
- English (1.106 billion users)
- Chinese (863 million)
- Spanish (344 million)
- Arabic (226 million)
- Portuguese (171 million)
- Malay (170 million)
- French (144 million)
- Japanese (118 million)
- Russian (109 million)
- German (92 million)
Moreover, the six official languages of the United Nations (UN)—English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and French—are all spoken by at least 100 million people each.
On the other hand, linguists estimate that one small, unwritten language disappears every two weeks. The extinction of smaller languages is a global trend. Not only is the economy becoming increasingly globalized, but so are languages. A language’s strength is now measured not just by its written form but by its presence on the Internet. A pessimistic forecast suggests that by the end of this century, out of the seven thousand languages spoken today, only about forty of the most dominant and widely used ones will remain.
*
Most Turkic-speaking nations (except Turkey) are small and fragmented. They write in nineteen literary languages using three different scripts: Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic. In the past, our ancestors even used runic writing. This internal fragmentation not only leads to stagnation but also complicates international communication—we are forced to use Russian or English as intermediaries. In Kazakhstan, the situation is further complicated by the division between Kazakh-speaking and Russian-speaking populations. Among Turkic diasporas, the threatening trend of language disappearance may very well lead to the assimilation of smaller languages by dominant ones.
What is evident is that for a language to thrive, for diverse content to be produced and successfully distributed, a sufficient population size is required.
How many people constitute a sufficient population? According to Kazakh film directors, for a movie to be profitable, the population should be around 40–50 million. The same applies to book authors and musicians. The success of South Korea (52 million people) in cinema and television proves this point. The larger the number of speakers, the stronger the language.
Among the six independent Turkic states, only Turkey exceeds this “critical mass.”
A Unified Alphabet
Twelve years ago, at the height of debates over transitioning to the Latin script, I wrote an article titled “Turkic Esperanto,” arguing that the real issue was not about accepting or rejecting the Latin alphabet but rather about unification for all Turkic peoples. And now, in September 2024, the first step in this direction has finally been taken in Baku.
As the saying goes: the new is simply the well-forgotten old. In reality, the first attempt at such a linguistic unification was made back in 1926, also in Baku, when the First All-Union Turkological Congress decided to transition to the Latin alphabet. In fact, even the Russian language was, at one point, considered for a transition to Latin script in anticipation of the World Revolution. In those distant, almost mythical times, the decision was made consciously, unanimously, and voluntarily. As a result, Turkey switched to the Latin alphabet in 1928, and the Soviet republic of Turkestan followed in 1929.
However, when the Bolsheviks’ dreams of a World Revolution “faded like smoke from apple blossoms”—to borrow a phrase from Sergey Yesenin—plans to latinize Russian were abandoned. Fearing the rise of Pan-Turkism, Soviet historians concocted an artificial theory of autochthonism, dividing the Turkic peoples into separate autonomous republics based on geography. To further integrate them into the Soviet empire, they were forcibly switched to the Cyrillic script between 1939 and 1940, with distinct literary languages created based on regional dialects. Even the word “Turkestan” was removed from official discourse.
Then, in 1991, sixty-five years after their first attempt, the former Turkic republics of the USSR embarked on a second try at linguistic unification. The simplest and most logical choice would have been to adopt the Turkish alphabet, which was already used by more than 50 percent of the Turkic-speaking population and had a successful history of implementation.
However, the ambitions of certain presidents pulled them in different directions, like the swan, the pike, and the crawfish in Ivan Krylov’s fable. For instance, Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, pushed for his own Kazakh version of Latin script, which was unacceptable to other Turkic states that each had a language to prioritize. It was also clear that the looming shadow of their northern neighbor, Russia, was actively working to hinder and delay the process.
For over 30 years, Turkic elders have argued endlessly over a seemingly trivial issue: “Should we include five additional letters in the Turkish alphabet or not?” But in the past three years, things have changed.
As the other saying goes, misfortune sometimes leads to fortune. A symbolic Turan is still a long way off, but we cannot forget Lao-tzu's words: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In these three years definitive steps have finally been taken.
A Unified Literary Language
The logical path forward is the creation of a common literary language—Commonturk, which would unite the informational and cultural space of the six independent Turkic countries. Let’s clarify from the outset: this is not about political unification, nor about sacrificing independence or national languages, but about establishing a supranational literary language, much like Chagatai Turkic in the past or English in Western Europe and Spanish in Latin America today.
A similar example can be found in the Arab world. Despite having fourteen distinct spoken dialects across twenty-two Arabic-speaking nations, these countries proclaimed the modernized written language of the Quran—Al-Fusha—as the literary standard. It is used in government documentation, media, education, literature, and the Internet, making it one of the six official languages of the UN.
Some argue that a century of separation has driven the Turkic peoples so far apart that reviving a common Turkic language is unrealistic, but while political divisions have certainly strengthened regional differences, the core linguistic structure of Turkic languages remains intact.
Linguists—except for those influenced by Soviet ideology—have long noted the remarkable closeness of Turkic languages (with the exception of Chuvash and Yakut). The renowned Russian Turkologist Nikolai Samoylovich, who was executed in 1938 on charges of Pan-Turkism, highlighted a number of shared linguistic features in his research:
- Sentence structure
- Agglutination (adding suffixes to modify meaning)
- Vowel harmony
- Stress on the last syllable
Similarly, Russian linguist Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who emigrated to Austria, wrote in the 1920s and 1930s about the astonishing kinship between geographically distant Turkic languages. He noted that Turkic dialects were far more mutually intelligible than the dialects of Italian or German.
History also shows that fragmented nations can adopt a unified literary language: The famously distinct and divisive principalities of Italy eventually embraced a standard Italian. The Germanic states did the same with a standard German.
As the Crimean Tatar linguist and philosopher Ismail Gasprinsky once said, “Unity is strength; division is destruction.” Turkish poet and philosopher Ziya Gökalp expanded on this idea when he wrote “The land of the Turks is not just Turkey or Turkestan; our homeland is the vast and eternal Turan.” A practical understanding of these prophecies comes to us only now, after more than 100 years. The current opportunity to create the unity Gasprinsky and Gökalp imagined has now become an imperative for us to not be lost in isolation.
Why Not Just Use Turkish?
Turkish already has the advantage of being the largest Turkic language, with a Nobel Prize–winning literary tradition. It would seem like the obvious choice for a common literary language. However, just like with the alphabet debate, Turkic elders prefer not to take the easiest path.
An alternative idea has been proposed: Commonturk, a universal language for our region, should be more linguistically balanced than Turkish. To achieve this, the creation of a Common Turkic Dictionary has been proposed.
Historically, Turkic written literature has been dominated by the Oghuz and Karluk branches, while the Kipchak and Siberian branches have remained largely oral. By incorporating elements from each, a standardized Common Turkic language could be built upon a four-branch vocabulary (Oghuz-Karluk-Kipchak-Siberian), covering 98 percent of the Turkic-speaking population.
A project to construct such a language, “Ortatürk,” is reportedly underway at the World Assembly of Turkic Nations (WATN).
*
Regardless of the method for achieving it, a unified literary language would allow Turkic states and speakers to overcome the “critical mass” problem. Theoretically, 200 million Turkic speakers would be united into a shared cultural and informational space. This kind of unification has the possibility to trigger a cultural boom—a “nuclear chain reaction” of Turkic creativity—and ensure that content creation is not limited by regional constraints, but flows into the global cultural mainstream. Under these circumstances, it’s not hard to imagine Commonturk, a language of hundreds of millions, becoming the seventh official language of the UN.
Kazakhstan’s Crossroads
Despite these bright prospects, Kazakhstan finds itself at a familiar crossroads one hundred years after the First All-Union Turkological Congress. The year 2025, which was previously set as the deadline for transitioning to Latin script, has arrived . . . and yet, nothing has changed. Perhaps the real issue is not the choice of which Latin script to use but rather the interference of a northern neighbor. But that is another story.
