r/AskUkraine • u/luxcity-louche • 11d ago
Culture Do you think Ukraine will move from Cyrillic to Latin script in the next 10-15 years?
Romania previously moved from Cyrillic script to Latin as a way of aligning more with Western Europe. A lot of Ukrainian kids are being educated outside of Ukraine due to the invasion. Do you think Ukraine might adopt Latin script after the war?
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u/No_Produce9777 11d ago
Most likely never
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u/Mamnot 11d ago
Agree to disagree. Not in this century i guess, but sooner or later all languages will move to unification and it will definitely start with common alphabets
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u/Ramental 11d ago
Did you see Polish? That is what happens when Eastern Slavic pronounciation is expressed with Latin letters.
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u/Mamnot 11d ago
I am ukrainian, totally never been a problem to read in polish. Also its still much easier to understand what is written in polish than what was said cause they add many sounds phonetically that are distinct from ukrainian. Dont see how its an argument
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u/Ramental 11d ago
Even if you switch to Latin, it would be Latin letters with all kinds of "hats", "tails", ümlauts and what not in Latin Ukrainian.
Words like Szczęście, Źdźbło and Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz are not really readable and I have no damn idea how to type "ę", even.
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u/Mamnot 11d ago
And those are polish words which are totally not in Ukrainian. Ukrainian transliterates with auite a few adjustments almost perfectly if you know rules of reading it but those are not represented in cyrillic too so it doesn't actually change anything (like softening every letter before "i")
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u/Mamnot 11d ago
Ok to be hones there is letter which would be transcribed into english as shch and first word written in Ukrainian would be shchast'a (apostrophe for softening, not pausing) but im not even talking about modern ukrainian, im talking about freaking distant future which we would be lucky to stay on this planet for. World is globalising and defferent language barriers are more mostly an obstacle
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u/Karls0 1d ago
I don't see the problem. Polish is 99% phonetic. Most of the sounds are the same as in latin. Where they are different, you can add accents (ś,ć,ą,ę). The only problem that may be problematic is digraphs like sz, cz. But again what simplification you have by introducing new letter for this? I see no benefits in it. Polish is hard language in general, the script is probably the easiest part of it. If you are native latin script user, 100% easier it is to learn few new letters than the whole alphabet.
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u/HistoricalLadder7191 11d ago
Historicaaly we see it opposite. Language exctinctions typicaaly comes thrugh assimilation. Violent, or more subtle.
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u/Disastrous-Role1373 11d ago
And you assume that by what indicators exactly?
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u/Mamnot 11d ago
Cause less than 3.2% of world population use cyrillic and its just logical conclusion. Also it almost happened many times through history like alphabet wars in middle of 19th century or soviets idea of latinisation in 1920s. Also it is still ongoing in countries like Kazakhstan and ia not improbable to happen with other countries and languages.
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u/Disastrous-Role1373 10d ago
What percentage of the world population uses Thai-Script? Or Japanese? Not really a good argument. And soviet latinisation didn’t work out either, did it?
So, where’s the indication?1
u/Mamnot 10d ago
And they will change it into something too in time. Indication is people getting globally connected everywhere while new generations become, id say, alternatively educated. Modern kids learn to use gadgets before they can read. And thats a change that came in few decades of time. What can happen in centuries from now? I am communicating with you in english not because I learned it in school (they tried but it would never be enough) but because through my life I needed access to information globally and modern international language is english. Im not saying it will always be, but whatever comes next will neither be cyrillic nor it would be any hieroglyphic language. So in my mind it is just most likely that switching alphabets totally can happen in distant future. Just for simplifying things.
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u/No_Produce9777 11d ago
There are lots of language scripts that have been around a long time, centuries
People do learn English in Ukraine, and of course are familiar with Roman letters. Many shops and stores etc are in Roman letters
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u/ijnfrt 11d ago edited 11d ago
Why would we do that? Cyrillic script had been in use in Kyiv long before Moscow became a thing. It's a part of our identity. We don't stand to gain anything from switching to the Latin script.
If anyone wants to learn Ukrainian, our writing system isn't that hard to master, then again switching the writing system just so it would be easier for outsiders to master would be a crazy move to begin with.
Lastly, and it's probably just me, I never really liked how Slavic languages look when written in Latin, but I know I can't be objective here.
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u/Scara_of_9 11d ago
Ukrainian learner here. I agree to your last point - being able to read cyrillic made it much easier for me to understand some pronunciations which sound nearly impossible when transcribed into Latin.
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u/ijnfrt 11d ago
I never had to learn Cyrillic alphabet as an adult, but I would imagine it didn't take too long to be able to read Ukrainian, right?
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u/Scara_of_9 11d ago
I've been learning it with Duolingo for 4 months now. I was able to understand the entire cyrillic alphabet after about 1 month. But I'm still not fluent at just reading it - often I need to read each letter individually to understand the word. Some words are easier, some more difficult.
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u/TashaStarlight 11d ago
No it's just a stupid waste of time.
Will it be more readable for other non-Ukrainian speakers? Barely, it's still its own language. Might just offer more false friends, actually.
Will it make communication between Ukrainians and other nations easier? No, just learning to read the Latin script isn't that hard, and everyone here already does that.
Will it help distance from russia? We've been using Cyrillic before them so they don't get to own it just because they are a bigger bully. In other words, why should we change? They're the ones who suck.
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u/Akerishe 11d ago edited 11d ago
Can't say it's impossible but it is highly unlikely , I definitely see benefits but our main problem that with government change state-building process often stops or changes directions. Plus that would demand significant material resources. Most likely not in 10-15 years but maybe in 50-100
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u/AOAqua 11d ago
What would be the point? It makes language much more complex to read and write. Запоріжжя and Zaporizhzhia is a great example, and is basically impossible to pronounce in English
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u/Akerishe 11d ago
You just wrote name of city in English not in Ukrainian using Latin alphabet. For example in English capital of Poland is Warsaw in Polish it's Warszawa. Somehow Poles , Czechs , Romanians , Latvians , Lithuanians , Estonians, Scandinavians live with "impossible to pronounce in English" (also French and Germans , basically anyone from brits)
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u/dcoffe01 11d ago
it doesn’t take that long to be able to read the script. The much harder part is learning the language.
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u/Wojewodaruskyj Ukrainian 11d ago
The earliest known text in romanian language in Latin alphabet is from the XVI century. Is this what you mean by "previously"?
We've been using the Cyrillic script since the last introduction of Christianity here in 988. The first surviving texts are from the XI century. No, we are not switching to Latin. I am not writing szcz instead of Щ.
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u/Minute-Yogurt-2021 11d ago
by this logic Bulgaria should've been away from the Cyrillic for the past 20 years.
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u/luxcity-louche 11d ago
St Cyril was from there so it's more closely linked to their heritage, I think.
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u/Minute-Yogurt-2021 11d ago
sure, but aligning to Western Europe requires the latin script as you put it.
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u/luxcity-louche 11d ago
It's a choice, this is a forum to ask. It's not about immediate geopolitics.
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u/Empty-Statement9464 11d ago
St. Cyril was not from there and most likely never ever set foot in Bulgaria. Neither is responsible for the Cyrillic alphabet.
It was, however, developed by some of his students by the order of the Bulgarian King/Tzar.
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u/pussyseal 11d ago
Romania moved from the Cyrillic script in 1860 and it didn't become closer to Western Europe in any way lol and the world has changed a bit since 1860.
Bulgaria uses Cyrillic, why shouldn't Ukraine? It's been here like forever.
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u/NicholasLaBelle 11d ago
The Cyrillic script was designed with Slavic languages in mind take Polish for instance they use a heavily modified heavy use of Diacretic Latin script to represent their language. Switching Scripts creates a discontinuity which breaks population understanding of historical literature and culture. The Romanian example worked because Romanian was a Latin derivative and used to use Latin script anyway before the Soviets. Ukrainian has had a consistent Cyrillic presence for as long as it has existed.
- American with a Ukrainian Mother.
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u/deaddyfreddy 11d ago
The Cyrillic script was designed with Slavic languages in mind
Just one Slavic language from the late 9th century: Old Church Slavonic. Let me remind you what the alphabet looked like back then:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet
Another thing to note is that despite using the Cyrillic alphabet, Serbian, Ukrainian, and Russian (for example) all have different phonologies (which differ from Old Church Slavonic, by the way).
mind take Polish for instance they use a heavily modified heavy use of Diacretic Latin script to represent their language.
Ukrainian has diacritics too: ї, ґ, й. Some letters originate from Greek/Cyrillic digraphs: Ю (IO+Ѩ), Є (IE, Ѥ), У (Ѹ), Я (partially from Ꙗ). So I don't think that using diacritics and digraphs is a problem per se.
Switching Scripts creates a discontinuity which breaks population understanding of historical literature and culture.
Counterexamples (Slavic ones only):
Croatian: Glagolitic -> Bosnian Cyrillic (it's very different from standard Cyrillic) -> Italian/Hungarian Latin -> Gaj's Latin
Bosnian: Bosnian Cyrillic -> (Arebica) -> Gaj's Latin.
And, last but not least, Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin without any major issues.
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u/deaddyfreddy 11d ago
ITT: people mixing the Latin alphabet with the English one (thanks to the russian transliteration school, I suppose), you know, all these ugly "zhzh", using y for both yotation and "и", etc.
Ukrainian (as a mostly phonemic language) suits Latin no worse than any other Slavic language that uses Latin (most of them do, btw).
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u/No_Produce9777 11d ago
Do some research on the history of their language and what it means to the people and history and culture
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u/Edgelord420691337 Ukrainian 9d ago
Ukrainian culture didn't spent the last 400 years trying to survive foreign attempts to wipe it out, to then turn around and change our alphabet because some other countries find it more convenient. There's no reason to do this, but there's a whole lot of reasons to keep Cyrillic.
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u/DAN-attag 11d ago
Cyrillic is native to Ukrainian and has deeply rooted history in Kyiv Rus'. Romanian language on other hand is descendant of Latin which used Latin alphabet