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When Kazakhstan announced its plan to fully transition from Cyrillic to Latin script by 2031, international observers focused on the geopolitics: the move is seen as distancing Astana from Moscow and the Soviet past while aligning closer with the West and other Turkic-speaking countries. But there's a more immediate, human dimension to this $664 million reform that gets far less attention: what happens to people's names?
Our new article in Cultural Perspectives, "The Impact of Script Reform on Names across Cultures: Lessons for Kazakhstan's 2031 Latinization," examines exactly this question by looking at how ten other countries - from Turkey to Montenegro to Moldova - handled the delicate task of transliterating personal and place names during their own alphabet transitions. What we found should concern Kazakhstan's policymakers: script reforms that treat names as a mere technical problem consistently fail, while those that recognize names as identity markers tend to succeed.
The $664 Million Question Nobody's Asking
Cost estimates from 2018 indicated that Latinization would require around $664 million, primarily for educational initiatives and printing new textbooks. That's 39% of Kazakhstan's 2018 GDP - an enormous investment. Yet in all the policy documents, technical committees, and public debates about the new alphabet, one question remains strangely underexamined: How do you transliterate "Қапшағай" (Kapshagay) or "Байқоңыр" (Baikonur) when the Latin script lacks some of the sounds these names contain?
More personally: if your surname is Омаров (Omarov), should it become Omarov (keeping the Russian suffix) or Omaruly (adopting Kazakh naming conventions)? This isn't just orthographic pedantry - it's about whether the reform deepens socioeconomic and linguistic divides or brings communities together.
What Turkey Got Right (and What Everyone Else Got Wrong)
Turkey's 1928 alphabet reform under Atatürk remains the gold standard. Why? Because it was comprehensive, coordinated, and backed by massive institutional investment. The new alphabet was designed with near-perfect phoneme-grapheme correspondence - every sound had exactly one letter. Names like "Çanakkale" and "Şanlıurfa" were standardized nationwide, supported by aggressive literacy campaigns and state education programs.
Compare that to Uzbekistan, which officially adopted Latin in 1993 but still uses Cyrillic widely in 2025. Street signs, newspapers, and legal documents remain in Cyrillic because the government never invested in synchronized rollout across institutions. The result? The same name might appear as O'zbekiston, Uzbekistan, or Ўзбекистон depending on which database, sign, or document you're looking at.
Azerbaijan faced different problems: their Latin alphabet is linguistically excellent (using ə for /æ/, ş for /ʃ/, ç for /tʃ/), but these diacritic-heavy letters don't work well in digital environments. Early websites, email systems, and databases simply stripped the diacritics, turning names like "Şirin" into "Sirin" - a different name entirely.
The lesson: A linguistically perfect alphabet is useless if computers can't handle it and institutions won't synchronize their implementation.
The Balkan Warning: When Names Become Political Weapons
The Western Balkans offer the most cautionary tales. In Montenegro, the choice between writing your name in Latin (Nikola) or Cyrillic (Никола) became a proxy for ethnic identity. Post-Yugoslav nation-building efforts tried to standardize Montenegrin orthography with new letters (ś, ź), but these reforms were disconnected from how people actually spoke, creating what linguists call "orthographic nationalism."
Serbia presents an even more complex picture. Despite Cyrillic being the official script, research shows 42.9% of people prefer writing their names in Latin, especially younger urbanites who associate it with modernity and international connectivity. The result is a silent orthographic shift: official policy says one thing, lived practice does another.
For Kazakhstan, this matters because the country faces similar dynamics: 25% of the population is ethnic Russian, and many Kazakhs have Russian-derived surnames ending in -ov and -ova. Will forcing these names into Latin script without sensitivity consultations create the same ethnic fractures Montenegro and Serbia experienced?
Moldova's Nightmare: When You Can't Find Yourself in Archives
Perhaps the most sobering case is Moldova, which oscillated between Latin and Cyrillic multiple times in the 20th century. The practical consequence? A single person might have three official variants of their name across different document sets: Soviet-era Cyrillic (Михаил Еминеску), Romanianized Latin (Mihail Eminescu), and Library of Congress transliteration (Mikhail Eminesku).
This isn't just bureaucratic inconvenience - it affects genealogical research, citizenship verification, property rights, and legal identity. Kazakhstan's 2031 reform risks creating exactly this fragmentation if authorities don't build data bridges between old Cyrillic records and new Latin forms.
What Kazakhstan Must Do Now (Before It's Too Late)
Based on our comparative analysis, we propose five urgent interventions:
1. Public Dialogue on Surname Policy
The government must directly address the -ov/-ova vs. -uly/-kyzy question before enforcement begins. Top-down decisions about family names will trigger backlash. Romania and Moldova teach us that inclusive consultation prevents decades of resentment.
2. Build the Digital Infrastructure First
Following Azerbaijan's mistakes, Kazakhstan must ensure that every computer system, database, and platform can handle Kazakh-specific Latin letters (Ä, Ğ, Ñ, Ö, Ü, Ş) before the rollout. Strip the diacritics and you strip the meaning: Şymkent becomes Symkent - a different place.
3. Create a National Name Database
Learn from Turkey's success: establish a centralized, publicly searchable registry that shows both Cyrillic and Latin forms of all toponyms and approved anthroponyms. This prevents the Uzbek problem where "official" and "actual" spellings diverge for decades.
4. Link Old and New Records
Moldova's chaos proves that archival continuity is non-negotiable. Every birth certificate, diploma, land deed, and court record in Cyrillic must be linkable to its Latin equivalent through stable identifiers - not just transliteration tables that lose information.
5. Don't Erase Memory
Bosnia offers a rare positive model: their e-bosanski platform preserves historical name forms (Arabic, Cyrillic, Glagolitic) while supporting modern Latin usage. Kazakhstan should treat Cyrillic names as historical heritage, not Soviet contamination to be erased.
Why This Matters Beyond Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan's transition is part of broader trends across Central Asia where alphabet reforms intersect with national identity, geopolitical shifts, and post-colonial discourse. But it's also a test case for any country attempting large-scale orthographic reform in the digital age.
Indigenous communities in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand face similar challenges restoring traditional place names into GPS systems and government databases. Ukraine is de-Russifying its toponymy. Mongolia debates reintroducing traditional script. All of these reforms succeed or fail based on how they handle proper names - the most visible, personal manifestations of language policy.
Our article demonstrates that script reform is never "merely technical." It's about who belongs, whose history counts, and how memory survives system changes. Kazakhstan has until 2031 to get this right. The experiences of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia, and Romania provide a roadmap - if policymakers are willing to learn from both successes and failures.
The question isn't whether Kazakhstan will adopt Latin script. The timeline has been extended to 2031, with President Tokayev stressing the need for a cautious approach while remaining committed to the reform. The question is whether, in 2035, a Kazakh citizen will be able to find their grandfather's name in an archive, spell their hometown correctly in an email, and write their own name in a way that honors both their heritage and their future.
That is the test of successful script reform. And right now, based on comparative evidence, Kazakhstan is not yet prepared to pass it.
Read the full research article: Rysbergen, K., & Schochenmaier, E. (2025). The Impact of Script Reform on Names across Cultures: Lessons for Kazakhstan's 2031 Latinization. Cultural Perspectives, 30, 228-252. https://doi.org/10.29081/CP.2025.30.11
