Interesting Characters: Why Doesn’t Everyone Adopt the Alphabet?
About a decade ago, a Beijing newspaper published a campus “gotcha” video that went viral nationwide. A reporter, armed with a pen and paper, put to a series of students at Peking University (which is about four times harder to get into than Harvard) a challenge: write the word “sneeze.” To his, and the nation’s, horror, many could not. Of course, they would all know the character if they saw it. But kids growing up in the internet age are so accustomed to writing digitally that the intricacies of China’s ancient script are lost on them.
The fact that Communist Party officials were among those offended is ironic. When their grandfathers (ideological and biological — in today’s Zhongnanhai, they are often the same) came to power, one of their principal goals was to eradicate characters entirely.
They were inspired by a wave of 20th Century revolutions that had washed away traditional scripts from Turkey to Vietnam. They hoped that the Latin alphabet would make education more accessible to the masses, and that it would help associate them with the modern West. Many of these linguistic revolutions succeeded. By 1949, Turkey’s literacy rate had tripled in a generation; nearly three quarters of Vietnamese, who had ditched Chinese characters under French influence, could read, compared to just a fifth of Mao’s subjects. By contrast, in India and the Arab world, literacy had hardly budged since independence.
For languages like Swahili that were setting words to paper for the first time, the choice was easy. But for those with long histories, reform was hard. Turkey’s general drive to modernise hit a speed bump in 1928 when its literacy rate hit zero overnight. But educated people naturally got with the programme. For millions of others, the Latin alphabet was simple, modern, and clear of the stigma of elitism for many communities where education had traditionally been out of reach.
The story was similar elsewhere. Even in Indonesia, whose laissez-faire Dutch overlords had made zero effort to spread their culture, people enthusiastically adopted their alphabet anyway.
As China’s new leaders pondered the future, many around the world expected the revolution to continue, leaving behind the arcane scripts of the past in the course of the march to progress. So, why did it not?
Of course, the reasons are manifold. Successful revolutions are alike, but those that fail are all unique. In China, for example, Chairman Mao opened a debate, but when he realised that advocacy for reform entailed criticising a government policy (of writing in characters) everyone involved was purged and/or murdered.
In other countries, the wave simply crashed against a strong wall of tradition. Japan also uses Chinese characters (in addition to two parallel scripts adapted to their unique grammar), but there was never any serious effort to change. In an orderly, conservative society where (even today) only 18% of people have passports and the question of whether the emperor is a living god is seriously controversial, the prospect of overturning a bedrock element of the culture is a non-starter.
For many Arabs, the idea of reform is not only hard, but heretical. Arabic is the language God chose to address humanity — if it is good enough for Him, surely the faithful can put a bit of extra effort into learning to write it as He intended. Furthermore, Islam’s restriction on graven images has helped elevate calligraphy to the paragon of art. East Asia does not share this stricture, but even in the new China, calligraphy is likewise still considered the sine qua non of sophistication.
De gustibus non est disputandum, but wariness of transplanting a European writing system is not purely an issue of cultural taste. Sometimes it does not make sense linguistically. A clear example comes, yet again, from China. Over centuries of standardisation, Mandarin Chinese has ironed out many of the grammatical and phonetic quirks that typify other languages, to the point that dozens of words are now pronounced exactly the same way. Early in the debate over language policy, one dissatisfied scholar laid this bare by publishing an entire poem using only words pronounced shi.
Today, everyone in China knows the Latin alphabet. But they use it with the aid of software that transforms letters into characters. These may be hard to learn, but have the advantage of not representing 94 distinct words the exact same way.
Likewise, it is not for nothing that the Japanese, Arabic, and Persian scripts have developed over centuries, tailored to the unique features of those languages. Maltese, which is basically a dialect of Arabic, did go Latin, but it works only with a dizzying array of augmented letters and diacritics.
Languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet could switch over. There is no better case-in-point than Serbia and Croatia, which speak the same language, but write it in Cyrillic or Latin, respectively. Other nations, like Moldova, have switched back and forth according to political pressure. But it is not for nothing that Cyrillic was designed (by a certain Greek monk named Cyril) for Slavic languages, and does a better job representing common vowels and consonant clusters than does an alphabet developed for Latin.
The strongest example of this comes from Korean, where King Sejong (r. 1418–1450) started a linguistic revolution centuries before it was cool. Exasperated by Chinese characters, he ordered his scholars to invent a new script just for Korean. The result, Hangul, was so intuitive that “a wise man can acquaint himself with [it] before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn in the space of ten days.”
Unfortunately for stupid men, the mandarins themselves did not like the vulgar script, and it did not become official till five centuries later. For specialised fields like law, medicine, and especially genealogy, Chinese characters are still important. But Hangul generally reigns supreme.
Although the clash between the Latin alphabet and the rest of the world has largely stabilised, there is still some movement. Kazakhstan is making a faltering effort to transition from Cyrillic to Latin, neither of which is particularly well-suited for Kazakh. Writing is more about politics than linguistics, and one wonders if Ukraine could be next. In Taiwan, children are taught using Bopomofo, an early attempt at a Chinese alphabet that was abandoned by the mainland; the government hopes to make English co-official in the 2030s.
For the same reason, the likelihood of another Latin wave seems unlikely. One can hardly see China, Russia, or the Islamic world reorienting their cultures to be more like the West. But modernity has also brought new practical considerations.
The men who developed today’s scripts were thoughtful and clever, but they did not contemplate digital keyboards. China and Japan have developed ingenious ways around this problem. So has India, but people often don’t bother to use it. To cultural conservatives’ chagrin, hundreds of millions of people increasingly express themselves online in their mother tongues, in Latin letters.
One country has gone another direction entirely. In 1946, Mongolia adopted the Soviet alphabet to get on the right side of history. That did not pan out, and they initially considered switching to Latin; but in 2020, the president made the surprise announcement that they would actually be going all the way back to the twisting vertical script of their horse lord forebears.
The majority of Mongols do not currently know the Mongol script, and it is uniquely ill-suited for the digital age — computer scientists have been bedevilled with how to make government websites scroll sideways. But unlike spoken language, the development of writing is rarely rational. It is possible the Latin alphabet will pick up momentum again. But if there is writing on the wall, it is hard to read it.
