Whenever I visit a country that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet, I’m always amazed by the amount of stuff that still gets written in Latin letters. You see it in Greece, Russia, Thailand, Arab countries, and although I’ve never been there, it looks like the sames story in Japan.
And it seems like pretty much every multinational company spells its name in the Latin alphabet, even when its home country doesn’t use that alphabet.
Plus if you look at internet forums, a lot of people seem to use some kind of Latin script to type Arabic, Russian, Japanese etc.
Are these different scripts likely to die out given time? Are there any movements towards adopting the Latin alphabet in, say, Greece or Russia? I know that Turkish originally used the Arabic alphabet before switching over to Latin, and in Googling I found out that Azerbaijani has done something similar, switching from Arabic to Cyrillic to Latin.
When I visited Montenegro last year I was surprised to find that the Latin alphabet seemed to be used almost exclusively - I had been lead to believe that Serbia and Montenegro both used Cyrillic, but it seems that Montenegro has already switched.
I think there is likely to be more movement to the Latin alphabet in the future, but the major scripts – Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese (all three of them), Korean, Thai, etc. – are unlikely to go away, for various linguistic and socio-cultural reasons.
Long-term resident of Japan, currently on vacation in Taiwan.
Not in our lifetime.
Using the Latin alphabet and – most often – English or other foreign words are fashionable, but there too many complexites in the languages to abandon their native written languages.
But this thread is about writing systems, not languages. A language can have any number of writing systems.
That said, things are looking better all the time. Unicode, the first acceptable standard for representing text in software, is catching on and the number of writing systems it can handle is growing all the time. At this point, all of the major living writing systems are fully covered (and then some) and current standardization work is filling in the gaps with the writing systems of long-dead languages and extremely rare living languages. Unicode forcing people to think about how to computerize writing systems that have never been computerized at all before or have only had ad hoc computerization to this point. Following the process is fascinating.
If you don’t think this matters, the Hawaiian language is written with characters found on standard American typewriters for a reason. The Soviet Empire forced Cyrillic on all of its colonies to maintain a single Russian-centric culture and stamp out the ethnic identities of minority groups. Writing systems are a big deal and computers are as important to writing as the printing press. Hell, these days printing presses are computers.
The reason being Hawaiian was not a written language until Westerners came along, so there never was a Hawaiian alphabet. There is a Thai alphabet, and there are computer programs using the Thai alphabet.
The Thai writing system is in no danger of dying out.
My camera can be set to display its information in Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Korean, or English, among quite a few others. And, judging by the number of Russian, Chinese, and Korean newspapers I find scattered around subway cars, those scripts aren’t dying out either.
The Cherokee developed their own written language after having been exposed to the English writing system but their alphabet bears only a passing resemblance to the Latin one.
I’m not positing anything evil in any of this. I’m just suggesting that the Hawaiian alphabet was born of convenience first and that Unicode would make such things less necessary.
The other day they broadcast a travel show on Bulgaria. The completely daft fool they sent out there (they always send out the people least equipped to travel anywhere outside their own city for some reason…) was heard to remark that the Bulgarians ‘still’ use Cyrillic. :rolleyes:
I don’t know of other writing systems but I’d reckon that Cyrillic is here to stay.
For Russian, I don’t think this is true. They use Cyrillic more and more as technical problems disappear. This is also true for texting. This is not strange: for Russians, it’s a pain in the ass not to use Cyrillic (a relatively small pita, but a pita nonetheless).
Not in Russia. The changes that you mention are all inspired by political reasons and not by some sort of efficiency-based convergence to a standing norm. In Russia, there is no political movement worth mentioning that would want to converge to Western standards and that would want to emphasize that convergence symbolically by switching alphabets. In the past, however, changes in Russian Cyrillic (by Peter the Great) were inspired by a desire to westernize. Today: no such thing. Instead, you can see usage of pre-revolutionary fonts and letters that basically show adherence to good old modern Russia in the face of westernization. One pretty big Russian newspaper, Kommersant" http://www.kommersant.ru/ (Коммерсантъ ), spells its title with a (superfluous) hard sign (ъ ), which is basically the pre-1917 spelling that was abandoned for very good reasons because there’s no reason to show that the ‘t’ is hard there since it’s hard by default. Anyway, this newspaper, in reverence of the good old days and everything, even carries this hard sign in its logo, as you can see when you click on the link.
