Cyrillic only

last updated 8 January 2015

Moscow

Russia’s highest court ruled this week that Russia’s ethnic provinces must write their languages in the Cyrillic alphabet. The ruling was aimed at Tatarstan, a Russian republic whose residents are mostly Muslim Tatars. They speak a language close to Turkish, and before Cyrillic was imposed in the 1920s, they wrote in the Arabic script. Lately, though, local officials have been trying to move to a Latin alphabet that they say would reflect the sounds of their language much better than the Cyrillic alphabet. At nearly 4 percent of the population, Tatars are the largest ethnic minority in Russia.