Kazakhstan authorities will pay local bloggers to promote the switch Latin alphabet. 462 million tenge (1.4 million US dollars) will be allocated for this purpose.
Bloggers to get 1.4 million dollars to promote Latin alphabet
Kazakhstan government intends to spend over 57 million tenge every year from 2018 to 2025 to promote the switch from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet, Tengrinews.kz reported.
The special plan published by the government includes promotion of certain hashtags to accompany information in social networks. The ministries responsible for the switch will also provide information for journalists reporting on the topic. Ads on TV and video channels online are also a part of the government’s plan.
The whole operation of moving a whole country to write in a different alphabet is not a small task. Linguists were also concerned about an excessive use of apostrophes in the new alphabet, as opposed to umlauts and phonetic markers, used by similar Turkic languages, NY Times reported. Apostrophes are used to modify or prolong sounds of certain letters.
The official name of the country, Republic of Kazakhstan, will look in the new transcription like this:
- Qazaqstan Respy’bli’kasy.
The definitive order to switch to Latin from Cyrillic was made in May 2017. The complete changeover to Latin should be completed by 2025.
The country had already briefly used Latin previously at the beginning of 20th century. However, it was later replaced by a Cyrillic script. Now the country is to complete a back flip and again start using Latin.
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