br23 blog - minsk, belarus

A Turkish court fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law banning characters not used in the Turkish alphabet. The court in the southeastern city of Siirt fined each of the 20 people 100 new lira for holding up the placards, written in Kurdish, at the event last year. The letters Q and W do not exist in the Turkish alphabet, but are used in Kurdish.

The 1928 Law on the Adoption and Application of Turkish Letters changed the Turkish alphabet from the Arabic script to a modified Latin script and required all signs, advertising, newspapers and official documents to only use Turkish letters. Many shops and companies in Turkey have names, signs and advertising using the letters Q, W and X which are not used in Turkish, in apparent violation of the 1928 law, but have not been prosecuted. (More on Reuters)

P.S. The very sad thing is that sometimes Belarusian speakers inside Belarus are treated almost as bad as Kurds in Turkey. There are striking similarities. The Lukashenka’s government have been enforcing Russification ever since 1994. And, it’s not only Lukashenka. There’s, of course, Russia itself. And now… Germany. With the new “Deutsche Welle” programme for Belarus they chose Russian as their broadcast language. This is the first time in history when a foreign short-wave broadcaster has chosen Russian, not Belarusian to broadcast to Belarus.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio Vatican, Swedish Radio, Lithuanian Baltic Waves, Polish Radio Polonia and Radyjo Racyja all broadcast in Belarusian.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 25th, 2005 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Belarusian language, Deutschland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.