At the beginning of October, the Organisation of Turkish States – which includes Turkey, Azerbaijan and the Central Asian ‘Stans’ – pledged to adopt a new common alphabet, which takes the Latin alphabet as a basis and adds eight new characters.

While announcing the choice, which will change the daily lives of 200 million people, Erdogan also presented two volumes already printed in the new alphabet: a work by Chyngiz Aykmatov, the greatest Kyrgyz writer of the 20th century, and the Book of the Oghuz, an epic about the deeds of the Turkish peoples that was put down in pages in the 1600s.

A show of power

It is impossible to underestimate the strength of this symbolic gesture. Since the days of Soviet rule, Central Asian languages have been written in Cyrillic characters: in a few years’ time, however, they could become graphically similar to Turkish, reinforcing the idea of an ethnic and cultural unity stretching from the Straits to the Hindukush mountains.

After all, Erdogan has never made a secret of wanting to undermine Putin as the political patron of Central Asia. His international ambitions in the area are well known to those involved in economics, military and so-called ‘geopolitics’.

Well, expanding the Latin alphabet in the area will make those ambitions clearly visible to everyone: the web pages, printed books and signs in the ‘Stan’ will no longer have anything in common with the web pages, printed books and signs in Russia, while they will be assimilated from the first glance to the web pages, printed books and signs in Turkey.

Now, it is unlikely that a medium-sized country like Erdogan’s has sufficient resources to project its influence over such an immense territory (while also trying to extend it over the Middle East, Islamic Africa and the Balkans). We know the megalomania of the guy.

But even if the new alphabet will not be able to replace Russian egemony with the Turkish one, it would still give all those countries a not inconsiderable advantage: an easier access to the development of artificial intelligences, which, having been trained on the English language and therefore on Latin characters, process data expressed in the same alphabet more easily

A success story

This fact alone should make us reflect on how strong is the soft power of that small handful of letters, codified (it is believed) by the Etruscans after their contact with Greek colonies some 2,700 years ago.
Since then, their use in the world has only increased from generation to generation, and today is much more widespread than we would instinctively think.

If pagan Rome had wiped out almost every trace of the languages of the peoples it had subjugated in Europe, papal Rome shared its alphabet to produce documents in the languages of the former ‘barbarians’: not only Franks and Spanish Visigoths, but Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, Germans, Frisians, Bohemians, Magyars, Baltics and Poles.
With the Carolingian Minuscule, the mother of all our lower case fonts, the clerics also set the most popular format in which that alphabet has been written to this day.

Then came the age of colonial expansion overseas. Today, all the Americas write in our alphabet (including some indigenous languages, of which missionaries compiled grammars and vocabularies), while 45 African countries adopt it for their traditional languages.

A watershed for many

There is no shortage of cases in which the switch to the Latin alphabet marked a deliberate break with the past.
Think of the Romanian principalities, which abandoned the liturgical Slavonic to present themselves as Western nations heirs of Rome and eager to escape the claws of Tsars and Sultans.
Think of the Albanians, who in 1908 chose the Latin alphabet as the exclusive script for their language to show off their compactness and pride as they declared their independence.
But let us think above all of Atatürk’s Turkey, which a century ago abandoned the old spelling derived from Arabic to give a sign of secularism and to facilitate learning in the new public schools that were opening in place of the Koranic schools.

This was the case in the old pre-digital world.
Now, with the advent of the digital age, we are witnessing phenomena that are more ambiguous to interpret but equally fascinating to learn about, primarily concerning the two Asian giants that are the protagonists of our century: India and China.

From English to Hinglish

In India, social media were the first to reach large urban centres, where users are often able to read and write directly in English.
Suffice it to say that in 2021, as many as 91% of the messages written by women on Meta group social networks (i.e. Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook) were in English.

This was, however, an insurmountable barrier to entry for people – and especially women – in the campaigns.
So, digital companies introduced plug-ins such as SwiftKey, whereby users can type a word in Latin characters and have it transliterated in real time in Devanagari script or Hindu phonetic. For example, they type ‘namaste’ and the screen directly displays ‘नमस्ते’.

Despite this opportunity, many Indians find it more comfortable to communicate in what they jokingly call ‘Hinglish‘, which is a kind of compromise: local languages written and read in the Latin alphabet.
In short: at this precise moment in history, the production of written texts in India (which is largely done via smartphones, as everywhere else in the world) involves the use of our alphabet to varying degrees.

China in the middle of crossing

Even more surprising, however, is what is happening in China.

The Chinese, with their thousands of hanzi (pictograms) that cannot fit on any digital keyboard, need Latin character inputs even more than the Indians.
Their system for typing Latin letters and getting Chinese pictograms as output is called pinyin, and is used by most Internet users (including 97% of teenagers).

In fact, more than a billion people every day use WeChat (the equivalent of Whatsapp), WeiBo (the equivalent of Twitter), Douyin (the non-drug version of Tiktok) and Youku (the equivalent of Youtube) by composing Mandarin words with the letters of our Roman ancestors.

Encourage or repress?

Some research has suggested that a good command of pinyin is essential to communicate in Mandarin on the web, and that learning pinyin should therefore be encouraged by schools and public authorities.

But this is a double-edged sword.
And it’s easy to understand why: how many Chinese will still remember how to draw Mandarin pictograms, after thirty or forty years spent writing texts almost exclusively online and with the pinyin filter?
Isn’t the autonomous ability to write in the mother tongue in danger of weakening?
After all, 101 million inhabitants of neighbouring Vietnam have already been writing in Latin letters for some time, since the pictograms imported from China had never lent themselves well to expressing their folk language.

Moreover, the first Chinese who are learning to use pinyin as a language in its own right, without activating the software that converts it into Mandarin pictograms, are the citizens who are critical of the government, who more easily fool the automatic filters with which the Chinese Internet is littered.

Once again, the Latin alphabet finds itself playing the role of a secret code to unlock more spaces of freedom.

The alphabet of the world

From the scriptoria of the Middle Ages to modern algorithms, the alphabet of Virgil and Cicero has influenced the lives of entire peoples, silently but concretely.
In fact, it is now a candidate to become the world’s alphabet: the key to all languages, just as Indian numerals have become the key to all sciences.

To see how much of an unrivalled tool of soft power it is, is simple. Let’s imagine a situation in reverse: if we were forced to draw Chinese pictograms on the screen with a stylus in order to text our children on Whatsapp ‘Back by midnight’, we would feel China everywhere in our lives.

And it would be a much less neutral presence than Indian numerals: mathematics has no political implications, whereas language and writing do, and current events are showing us how profound they are.