What happens to Paris, Vienna, London, Beijing or Riyadh when a country changes its script? This is not merely a question of replacing one set of letters with another. It is a question of language policy, cultural memory, phonology, international standardization and identity.
Our new article, published in Acta onomastica 67/2 (2026), addresses precisely this problem:
Dana Pashan, Kyzdarkhan Rysbergen & Eugen Schochenmaier
“Exonymization Strategies Across Scripts: A Typological Review and Research Agenda for Kazakhstan”
Acta onomastica 67/2 (2026), pp. 389–412
DOI: 10.58756/a2673416
When transliteration is not enough
Kazakhstan is moving from the Cyrillic to the Latin script. At first glance, the task may appear straightforward: develop a conversion system and transliterate existing geographical names.
But foreign place names make the problem much more complicated.
Many names currently used in Kazakh have reached the language through Russian mediation. A mechanical conversion from Cyrillic into Latin could therefore simply preserve Russian phonological patterns in a new alphabet rather than create genuinely Kazakh forms.
The article asks a fundamental question:
Should Kazakhstan simply transliterate its existing exonyms - or should it reconsider how foreign geographical names are adapted into Kazakh altogether?
That question has not yet received a systematic answer.
Five script traditions, five different solutions
To understand what Kazakhstan might do, the article first looks outward.
It compares exonymization practices across five major script environments:
Indic and Southeast Asian abugida scripts
the Chinese logographic script
Arabic and Hebrew
Cyrillic
and the Latin-script transitions of Turkic-speaking countries
The comparison shows that there is no universal solution.
Some systems prioritize pronunciation. Others preserve traditional forms. Some translate transparent geographical elements. Others combine phonetic and semantic strategies. In almost every case, historical convention and institutional regulation play a decisive role.
Paris is not simply “Paris”
The article illustrates how dramatically one geographical name may change across writing systems.
In Chinese, Paris becomes 巴黎 (Bālí), using characters primarily for their sound.
In Russian, Париж (Parizh) preserves a historically mediated form that likely entered through Polish rather than directly from modern French pronunciation.
In Arabic and Hebrew, foreign names must be adapted to writing systems in which vowels are represented differently.
Indic scripts face another problem: consonant clusters and word-final consonants often have to be reshaped to fit the phonotactic structure of the receiving language.
These are not minor spelling differences.
They show that every language effectively reconstructs the geographical world through its own phonology, orthography and naming traditions.
Lessons from Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan
The most directly relevant comparisons come from other Turkic-speaking countries that have already experienced major script reforms.
The article examines Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Their experiences provide both models and warnings.
Turkey demonstrates the strength of a stable phonologically oriented alphabet, but also shows what can happen when questions of foreign-name standardization are left to develop gradually after the reform.
Azerbaijan illustrates the tension between linguistic precision, international readability and digital usability.
Uzbekistan shows the problems created by long-term coexistence of Cyrillic and Latin scripts and repeated modifications to the alphabet.
Turkmenistan demonstrates how unstable or impractical letter choices can complicate education, administration and the standardization of names.
The central lesson is striking:
script reform cannot be separated from name policy.
If exonyms are ignored until after the alphabet has been settled, inconsistent forms can become entrenched in maps, textbooks, media and digital databases for decades.
Kazakhstan has a rare opportunity
Kazakhstan’s situation is unusual.
The country has already experienced two major script changes in the twentieth century: from Arabic script to Latin in 1929 and from Latin to Cyrillic in 1940. The present reform therefore represents the third major script transition in less than a century.
But there is also an advantage.
Unlike earlier reforms elsewhere, Kazakhstan has the opportunity to address exonymization before inconsistent practices become fixed.
The article identifies several unresolved questions:
How should inherited Russian-mediated exonyms be treated?
Should foreign names be retranscribed according to Kazakh phonology?
How should Kazakh-specific sounds be represented in foreign names?
Which institution should have final authority over standardized forms?
How should maps, education, official administration and digital platforms coordinate their usage?
And can corpus linguistics and machine learning help identify actual usage and improve consistency?
The real lesson is institutional
One of the article’s most important conclusions is that successful exonymization is not primarily a matter of finding the “perfect” phonetic system.
The comparative evidence suggests that the decisive factor is institutional organization.
Countries that achieve greater consistency tend to have:
a designated authority,
explicit published guidelines,
and a mechanism for revising those standards as language use changes.
Without such structures, competing forms emerge across maps, textbooks, databases and public administration.
This is why exonymization should not be treated as a minor technical appendix to alphabet reform.
It is part of language planning.
More than a Kazakhstan case study
Although Kazakhstan provides the immediate focus, the article addresses a much wider problem.
Whenever names move between languages and scripts, they sit at the intersection of:
sound, writing, history, cultural memory, political convention and institutional authority.
An exonym is therefore never simply a converted string of letters.
It is the result of a relationship between languages.
That is why forms such as Вена, Париж, Bālí, Rūmā or their future Kazakh equivalents tell us much more than how one language writes a foreign city.
They tell us how one linguistic community incorporates the outside world into its own system of names.
And as Kazakhstan prepares for a new Latin-script future, that question is becoming increasingly urgent.
DOI: 10.58756/a2673416
The article was produced within the research project BR24993133, funded by the Science Committee of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
For researchers working on exonyms, geographical names, script reform, transliteration, language policy, Central Asia or the digital standardization of names, we hope the article provides both a comparative reference and a starting point for further discussion.
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