The Clash between Latin and Arabic Alph...

In this article, I will address the topic of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria in the interwar period through the interpretive lens of the “linguistic” or better “alphabetic” rights, placed in the context of the “Latinization” processes taking place in the wide Eurasian space, as well of the post-imperial sociopolitical dynamics. To this aim, I describe the interesting and little known case of the writing practices of the Turkish community in Bulgaria in the period between the two world wars. In particular, I take into accou nt the repercussions of Atatürk’ s alphabetical reform in Bulgaria, demonstrating how the adoption of the Latin alphabet in Turkey represented a significant challenge for the country, triggering the fears of both the Bulgarian authorities and of the more conservative factions of the local Turkish community. In this context, I analyze the attitudes towards the Arabic and the Latin alphabet employed to write the Turkish language in the Balkan country, illustrating the reasons for the prohibition of the Turkish Latin alphabet, in an unprecedented combination of interests between Bulgarian authorities and Islamic religious leaders. I will try to show how in that specific historical moment, writing systems, far from being “neutral” communication elements, lent themselves to various manipulations of an ideological and political nature.