Imagine waking up one morning to find that every book, every newspaper, and every street sign in your country is written in a script you cannot read. The familiar curves and dots of your native writing system have been replaced overnight by foreign-looking letters. This isn’t the plot of a dystopian novel; it was the reality for the people of Turkey in 1928, during one of the most audacious and rapid linguistic experiments in modern history: the Alphabet Revolution, or Harf Devrimi.
The Script That Didn’t Fit: The Problem with Ottoman Turkish
For centuries, the language of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Turkish, was written using a modified Perso-Arabic script. While this script was perfectly suited for Arabic, a Semitic language, it was a phonetic nightmare for Turkish, a Turkic language with a completely different sound structure.
The core of the problem lay in the vowels. Turkish is a vowel-rich language with eight distinct vowel sounds (a, e, ı, i, o, ö, u, ü). The Arabic script, however, primarily represents consonants and has only three long vowel signs and optional diacritics for short vowels, which were often omitted in everyday writing. This created massive ambiguity. For example, the Turkish word for “come” (gel), “rose” (gül), and “lake” (göl) could all be written identically as گل. The reader had to guess the correct word from the context, a difficult task that required extensive training.
This linguistic mismatch had a profound social consequence: low literacy. Learning to read and write Ottoman Turkish was an arduous process, effectively restricting literacy to a small administrative and intellectual elite. For the vast majority of the population, the written word was an inaccessible code.
Atatürk’s Vision: Writing a New Nation
Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rose as the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. His vision was to create a modern, secular, and Western-oriented nation-state from the ashes of the old empire. To do this, he believed Turkey needed a clean break from its Ottoman and Islamic past, which he felt was holding the nation back.
The alphabet was a powerful symbol of that past. The Arabic script was inextricably linked to the Quran and the Islamic world. For Atatürk, adopting a Latin-based alphabet was not just a practical matter of improving literacy; it was a revolutionary act of cultural reorientation. It was a way to turn Turkey’s face toward the West and symbolically sever its ties to the old order. He famously declared, “The new Turkish letters must be learned quickly. They must be taught to every citizen, to the peasant, to the shepherd, to the porter, and to the boatman. You must consider this a patriotic and national duty.”
A Race Against Time: Creating the New Turkish Alphabet
In May 1928, Atatürk established the Language Commission (Dil Encümeni), a group of linguists, scholars, and officials tasked with an enormous challenge: create a new alphabet for the Turkish language. They were given a mere matter of months.
The commission studied existing Latin-based alphabets and adapted them to perfectly match the phonetics of Turkish. The goal was a one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol, making the new script incredibly easy to learn. They introduced several new characters for sounds not found in English:
- Ç (ç) – for the “ch” sound in “church”
- Ş (ş) – for the “sh” sound in “shoe”
- Ğ (ğ) – the “soft g,” which lengthens the preceding vowel
- Ö (ö) and Ü (ü) – for the rounded front vowels, similar to German
- I (ı) and İ (i) – a crucial distinction. The dotless ‘ı’ represents a sound like the ‘a’ in “sofa,” while the dotted ‘i’ is the ‘ee’ in “see.” This distinction exists in both uppercase and lowercase, a unique feature of the Turkish alphabet.
On August 9, 1928, Atatürk personally unveiled the new alphabet to the public at an event in Istanbul, famously taking a blackboard and chalk to demonstrate the new letters himself.
The “Nation’s Schools” and a Cultural Transformation
The implementation was as swift as the creation. On November 1, 1928, the Turkish Parliament passed Law 1353, making the new alphabet mandatory for all public communication effective January 1, 1929. The transition period was shockingly brief.
To teach the entire nation, the government established “Nation’s Schools” (Millet Mektepleri). These mobile classrooms and learning centers sprung up across the country, in villages and cities alike. Attendance was compulsory for all citizens between the ages of 16 and 45. Atatürk himself toured the country, acting as the “Head Teacher” (Başöğretmen), championing the new letters in public parks and town squares.
The results were staggering. The literacy rate, which was estimated to be around 10% in the early 1920s, skyrocketed. By the 1950s, it had climbed to over 40%, and today it stands at over 97%. The new alphabet was an undeniable success in democratizing education.
A Severed Connection? The Cultural Cost of Revolution
While the Alphabet Revolution was a triumph for literacy and modernization, it was not without its costs. The reform created a deep cultural chasm. An entire generation became unable to read the literature, history, administrative records, and even the personal letters of their parents and grandparents. The vast literary heritage of the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire was suddenly rendered inaccessible to the general public.
Critics argue that the move caused a form of “cultural amnesia,” cutting Turkey off from its own rich history. While scholars and specialists can still study Ottoman texts, the average Turkish citizen has lost a direct, personal connection to that past. A Turk today cannot walk into a library and pick up a book published before 1928 and read it with ease.
The Alphabet Revolution remains a potent example of the power of a writing system to do more than just represent sounds. It can shape a national identity, define a country’s direction, and serve as a tool for profound social and political change. It was a trade-off: the ease of learning and a connection to the modern world in exchange for a direct link to a millennium of history. It was, in every sense of the word, the rewriting of a nation.