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The Central Asian states — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — are debating switching from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. Most of the Central Asian countries first broached the topic in 2006, but there has been no action on it until now.
All the Central Asian states except Tajikistan (which is ethnically Persian) are related to the Turkic ethnolinguistic family; however, when Josef Stalin led the Soviet Union, he passed a law making Russian — and consequently the Cyrillic alphabet — the official language in his new Soviet satellites. Many of the Central Asian states converted their alphabets over to Cyrillic and then used both Russian and their native languages in that alphabet. This created a semblance of unity among the Soviet Union under the Russian language umbrella. Today, most of the Central Asian states consider themselves bilingual, though in parts of each state the native language is no longer used.
But since the fall of the Soviet Union, these governments have said they are isolated given that Western banking, computers and the Internet all use the Latin alphabet while their countries use the much larger and complex Cyrillic alphabet. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have already begun switching over to the Latin script in their business sector, saying it will improve Western investment and development within their countries (though the alphabet is far from the only roadblock Western companies face in these states).
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