Spread of the Latin script

tablet (c. 700 BCE), containing the earliest known Etruscan abecedarium. The Latin script originated in archaic antiquity in the Latium region in central Italy. It is generally held that the Latins, one of many ancient Italic tribes, adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BCE from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy – making the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic scripts emerging at the time. The early Latin script was heavily influenced by the then regionally dominant Etruscan civilization; the Latins ultimately adopted 22 of the original 26 Etruscan letters, == Antiquity ==

Latinisation of Italy from 500 BC to 218 BC through the Latin War (light red), Samnite Wars (pink/orange), Pyrrhic War (beige), and First and Second Punic War (yellow and green). Cisalpine Gaul (238-146 BC) and Alpine valleys (16-7 BC) were later added. The Roman Republic in 500 BC is marked with dark red. Roman expansion in Italy spread the Latin script Along with the Latin language, the Latin writing system first spread over the Italian Peninsula with the rise of the Roman Republic from the 4th to the 1st century BCE. By the 4th century, the Latin alphabet had been standardised by the city of Rome and begun to dominate Latium.), or maintained frequent contact with the Romans and other Latins, who set up numerous coloniae in annexed and allied territories. After the subjugation of Southern Italy in the Pyrrhic War (280–275 BCE), Messapic (using a Greek-derived alphabet) disappeared completely, and with the exception of the two Griko enclaves that still exist in the 21st century, Latin replaced all Greek in Magna Graecia. The Iberian language was spoken until at least the 1st century CE; the Basque language is still spoken in the 21st century, but uses a 27-letter Latin alphabet for writing. The use of Latin as the Byzantine language of administration persisted until the adoption of Middle Greek as the sole official language by Heraclius in the 7th century. Scholarly Latin rapidly fell into disuse among the educated classes, although the language continued to be at least a ceremonial part of the Empire's culture for some time. == Middle Ages ==

Migration Period The Germanic peoples that invaded and gradually settled the Western Roman Empire between the 5th and 8th centuries originally had little written culture to speak of; apart from some runic inscriptions amongst most tribes, there was no written administration or literature, and oral tradition prevailed instead. After the Migration Period (c. 300–800), the Germanic elite not only adopted the Latin script and spread it further, but usually also employed the Latin language for early medieval politics and literature. all Old High German texts are written with the Latin alphabet. However, because it was ill-suited for representing some of the sounds of Old High German, this led to considerable variations in spelling conventions, as individual scribes and scriptoria had to develop their own solutions to these problems. Christianisation The spread of Western Christianity during the early Middle Ages strongly contributed to spreading the Latin script across Europe, especially in areas beyond the old Roman limes that barely had any written culture up to that point, such as Scandinavia and East Central Europe. Western Christian missionaries associated the non-Latin scripts with paganism, and therefore insisted on their abandonment. The Latin script was introduced to Scandinavia in the 9th century, first in Denmark. Scandinavia went through a phase of digraphia between Latin letters and Norse runes before abandoning the latter, with some individuals being proficient in both during this transition. as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism. The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. Modern Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin have come to use both scripts, whilst the Eastern South Slavic Bulgarian and Macedonian languages have maintained Cyrillic only. == Early modern period ==

As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, South Western, Northern and Central Europe. The Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and Greek speakers around the eastern Mediterranean used the Greek alphabet. The Arabic script was widespread in the Islamic world, among both Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples, as well as amongst Arab Christians. Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script. Since the 15th and especially 16th centuries, European colonisation has spread the Latin script around the world, to the Americas, Oceania, and parts of Asia and Africa (until about 1880 mostly limited to the coastal areas) and the Pacific, along with the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch languages. Americas In an effort to Christianise and 'civilise' the Mayans, the Roman Catholic bishop Diego de Landa of Yucatán ordered the burning of most Maya codices in July 1562, and with it the near destruction of the Mayan hieroglyphic script. He then rewrote the history of the Mayans in Spanish, and the Mayan language was romanised, leading to an enormous loss in culture. Attempts to introduce Latin alphabets instead of Brahmi-derived scripts for other Indian languages have so far been unsuccessful. Nevertheless, British colonialism introduced the widespread use of the Latin-lettered English language in the subcontinent, which has retained and even expanded its prominence in the post-independence era in both India and Pakistan. Southeast Asia and Pacific The Latin script was introduced for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of Indonesia and the Philippines, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. The Latin script fits the phonology of Austronesian languages very well, which helped speed up its adoption, as well as helping it to mostly displace the Arabic-based Jawi script in Muslim countries, especially Indonesia. (This is in contrast to other languages in mainland Asia, where Latin script is a much poorer fit and would require heavy use of diacritics, as with Vietnamese, which actually did adopt Latin script.) During the Dutch rule on Formosa (1624–1662), the island currently known as Taiwan, the Siraya language was given a Sinckan Latin alphabet by the Dutch, which lasted until the 19th century. == 19th century ==

Africa The Scramble for Africa (1881–1914), meaning the rapid occupation, colonisation and annexation of inland Africa by European powers, went hand in hand with the spread of literacy amongst native Africans, as the Latin script was introduced where there were other writing systems or none. Until the early 19th century, the Berber peoples in North Africa had two systems: originally Tifinagh, and, following the spread of Islam, the Arabic script as well. French colonists, particularly missionaries and army linguists, developed a Berber Latin alphabet to make communication easier, especially for the Kabyle people in French Algeria. Since no great body of Berber literature existed, and the colonisers greatly helped improve literacy rates, the romanisation received much support, more so after Algerian independence (1962) when the French-educated Kabyle intelligentsia began to stimulate the transition and especially since the establishment of a standard transcription for Kabylie in 1970. Similar French attempts to Latinise the Arabic language met much more resistance, were unsuccessful and eventually abandoned. Galicia "Proposal to Write Ruthenian With Latin Letters", published in 1859 in Vienna. From the 1830s to the 1880s, Ukrainians in Galicia (then divided between the Austrian Empire and Russian Empire) were engaged in a linguistics controversy known as the Alphabetical War. They discussed whether the Ukrainian language (then known as "Ruthenian") was best written in the Latin script (based on the Czech model) against perceived Russification, or in the Cyrillic script against perceived Polonisation. In the end, Cyrillic prevailed. Romanian People speaking Romanian gradually adopted the Latin alphabet in the 19th century, following centuries of usage of the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet. They did so under the influence of nationalism. Some of the earliest to do so were scholars from the late-18th-century Transylvanian School, who modified the Hungarian Latin alphabet for writing Romanian. The linguist Ion Heliade Rădulescu first proposed a simplified version of Cyrillic in 1829, but in 1838, he introduced a mixed alphabet containing 19 Cyrillic and 10 Latin letters, and an [i] and [o] that could be both. This 'transitional orthography' was widely used until the official adoption of a completely Latin Romanian alphabet in Wallachia (1860) and Moldavia (1863), that were gradually united since 1859 to become the Kingdom of Romania in 1881. Romanian intellectuals in Hungary (part of Austria-Hungary), mainly in Transylvania and Banat, and scholars in Wallachia-Moldavia agreed to cleanse the language from all non-Latin elements (Greek, Magyar, Slavic, and Ottoman), and to emulate French wherever needed. Russian Empire Russian and Polish are both Slavic languages and have many similarities, thus from the 1840s on, Russia considered introducing the Cyrillic script for spelling the Polish language, with the first school books printed in the 1860s. The idea was quickly abandoned due to Polish being completely substituted by Russian in education as part of Russification process. The initially successfully enacted Lithuanian press ban (1865–1904) outlawed the use of Latin script, whilst encouraging writing Lithuanian texts in Cyrillic. Resistance grew as time went on: Lithuanian books were smuggled into the country, mainly from Lithuania Minor in East Prussia. Although the Russian authorities tried to seize them, they could not stop the rapid increase in forbidden titles from crossing the border. The Lithuanian ban, lifted in 1904, is widely felt to have stimulated the Lithuanian national movement and embracing the Latin script, rather than discouraging it. Vietnam A romanization of Vietnamese was codified in the 17th century by the French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660), based on works of the early 16th-century Portuguese missionaries Gaspar do Amaral and António Barbosa. This Vietnamese alphabet (chữ quốc ngữ or "national script") was gradually expanded from its initial domain in Christian writing to become more popular among the general public, which had previously used Chinese-based characters. During the French protectorate (1883–1945), colonial rulers made an effort to educate all Vietnamese, and a simpler writing system was found more expedient for teaching and communication with the general population. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that the romanized script came to predominate written communication. To further the process, Vietnamese written with the alphabet was made obligatory for all public documents in 1910 by issue of a decree by the French Résident Supérieur of the protectorate of Tonkin in northern Vietnam. == 20th century ==

Albanian Albanian had used a variety of writing systems since its first attestation in the 12th century, especially Latin (in the north), Greek (in the south), Ottoman and Arabic (favoured by many Muslims). There were attempts at standardisation throughout the 19th century, from 1879 led by the Society for the Publication of Albanian Writings, culminating in the 1908 Congress of Manastir when a single Latin script, Bashkimi, was chosen for the whole language. Although the newly adopted Albanian Latin alphabet symbolised a break with Ottoman rule, some Islamist Kosovo Albanians objected strongly against it, preferring to maintain the Arabic script that was found in the Quran, which they held sacred. However, nationalists maintained that the Latin alphabet was 'above religion' and therefore also acceptable to non-Islamic and secular Albanians; and they won the argument. China After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Zedong initially considered Latinizing written Chinese, but during his first official visit to the Soviet Union in that year Joseph Stalin, who stopped the Latinizing of all languages in the Soviet Union in 1930, convinced Mao to maintain the existing Chinese writing system. Instead Zhou Youguang created the pinyin system and Chinese characters were simplified. As a remnant of the romanization era, for official writing of the Zhuang language the Latin alphabet was chosen over some form of standardised centuries-old Sawndip script based on Chinese characters. The practical consequences of this are limited though, since most Zhuang speakers still use Sawndip. The Uyghur language in China used a Latin-derived alphabet created upon Pinyin spelling conventions, but it was abolished in 1982 and the Arabic script was restored. Serbo-Croatian , primarily amongst Croatians and Slovenes (Roman Catholics), Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Kosovars (Albanian Muslims). Cyrillic texts are dominant in areas primarily inhabited by Serbs, Montenegrins, and Macedonians (Eastern Orthodox Christians). This cultural boundary has existed since the dichotomy of the Greek East and Latin West. Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj devised a uniform Latin alphabet for Croatian in 1835, while in 1818, Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić had developed a Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. In the first half of the 19th century, the Illyrian movement to unite all Southern Slavs (Yugoslavs) culturally, and perhaps also politically, was quite strong, and efforts were made to create a unified literary language that would set the standard for all Yugoslav dialects. The Vienna Literary Agreement (March 1850) between writers from Croatia, Serbia and one from Slovenia was the most significant attempt, where some basic rules were agreed upon. In the 1860s, Vuk's orthography gained acceptance in Serbia, while a Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts was founded in 1866 in Zagreb and the first 'Serbo-Croatian' grammar book by Pero Budmani was published in Croatia in 1867. In 1913, Jovan Skerlić proposed a compromise for a single writing system and dialect to create true language unity. After World War I, political unity was realised in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but an agreement on scriptural unity for its population was never reached. The post-war Titoist Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia made another attempt at achieving linguistic unity, but the 1954 Novi Sad Agreement only managed to get equality of Latin and Cyrillic, and an obligation for all citizens to learn both alphabets. With the return of ethnic nationalism in the 1980s, the two again became heavily associated with particular variants of the Serbo-Croatian language and thus with national identities. Exacerbated by the Yugoslav Wars that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, nationalists on all sides resumed insisting Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin were distinct languages in their own right, undermining the project of Serbo-Croatian linguistic unity. The Bosnian language was originally primarily expressed in the Cyrillic-type Bosančica since the 11th century (originally alongside the older Glagoljica), but it was gradually driven extinct in the 18th century after the Ottoman introduction of the Perso-Arabic script-type Arebica (15th–20th century). Eventually, most Bosnians adopted the Croatian-derived Latinica or Latin script –originally introduced by the Catholic Franciscans In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets. Although the only official Kurdish government, the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, uses an Arabic script for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish speakers, especially in Turkey and Syria. During the late 20th century decolonisation, Pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism expressed themselves in anti-Western tendencies, including hostility towards the Latin script. It was banned in some places such as Libya after Moammar Gaddafi's 1969 coup, in favour of exclusive Arabic script. Soviet Union Since at least 1700, some Russian intellectuals have sought to Latinise the Russian language in their desire for close relations with the West. The Bolsheviks had four goals: to break with Tsarism, to spread socialism to the whole world, to isolate the Muslim inhabitants of the Soviet Union from the Arabic-Islamic world and religion, and eradicate illiteracy through simplification. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk adopted the new Turkish Latin alphabet in 1928, this in turn encouraged the Soviet leaders to proceed. – from the Persian to Latin and then to the Cyrillic script – while Iranian Azerbaijanis continued to use the Persian as they always had. Despite the wide use of Azerbaijani in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, it did not become the official language of Azerbaijan until 1956. After achieving independence from the Soviet Union 1991, the new Republic of Azerbaijan decided to switch back to the Latin script. Two other newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova on 31 August 1989, officially adopted Latin alphabets for their languages. In 1995, Uzbekistan ordered the Uzbek alphabet changed from a Russian-based Cyrillic script to a modified Latin alphabet, and in 1997, Uzbek became the sole language of state administration. However, the government's implementation of the transition to Latin has been rather slow, suffered several setbacks and as of 2017 has not yet been completed. In 2021, the country expressed its ambition to complete the transition process by 2023. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. Kazakhstan, however, planned to start a transition process to the Latin alphabet in 2023. Turkmenistan The Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic employed a Latin alphabet from 1928 to 1940, when it was decreed that all languages in the Soviet Union be written in Cyrillic. After gaining independence in 1991, Turkmenistan was amongst several ex-Soviet states seeking to reintroduce the Latin script. Although totalitarian dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, ruling Turkmenistan from 1985 to his death in 2006, announced a decree on 12 April 1993 that formalised a new Turkmen Latin alphabet, the de facto implementation has been slow and incomplete. The original 1993 alphabet had 30 letters, but missed several sounds and did not fit the Turkmen language, so several amendments were made in 1996. The first book in Latin script was printed in 1995, but Turkmen language and literature manuals were not available until 1999; Cyrillic manuals had been banned before Latin ones were available. Although by 2011 the younger generations were well-versed in the Turkmen Latin alphabet through the education system, adults, including teachers, were not given any official training programme and were expected to learn it by themselves without state support. == 21st century ==

Kazakhstan Unlike its Turkic neighbours, Kazakhstan did not immediately move towards Latinisation after obtaining statehood in 1991. This was motivated by pragmatic reasons: the government was wary to alienate the country's large Russian-speaking minority (who wrote Russian in Cyrillic), and due to the economic crisis in the early 1990s, a transition was considered fiscally unfeasible at the time. It was not until 2017 that Latin became the official script for the Kazakh language in Kazakhstan, replacing Cyrillic. In 2006, President Nursultan Nazarbayev requested the Ministry of Education and Science to examine the experiences of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which had all switched to Latin script in the 20th century. The ministry reported in the summer of 2007 that a six-step plan, based primarily on the Uzbekistan model, should be implemented over a 12-to-15-year period at the cost of about $300 million. Aside from integrating Kazakhstan into the global economy, officials have argued it would help the development of a Kazakh national identity separate from Russia. In 2015, the Kazakh government announced that the Latin script would replace Cyrillic as the writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025. In 2017, Nazarbayev said that "by the end of 2017, after consultation with academics and representatives of the public, a single standard for the new Kazakh alphabet and script should be developed." Education specialists were to be trained to teach the new alphabet and provide textbooks beginning in 2018. The romanisation policy is intended to modernise Kazakhstan and increase international cooperation. On 19 February 2018, president Nazarbayev signed an amendment to the decree of 26 October 2017 No. 569 "On translating the Kazakh alphabet from Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin script." The amended alphabet uses "Sh" and "Ch" for the Kazakh sounds "Ш" and "Ч" and eliminates the use of apostrophes. Canada In October 2019, the organization National Representational Organization for Inuit in Canada (ITK) announced that they will introduce a unified writing system for the Inuit languages in the country. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet and is modeled after the one used in the Greenlandic language. Oklahoma (United States) From 2006, a new writing system was developed for the Native American Osage language, challenging the dominance of the Latin script for writing that language. == Debates and proposals ==

Bulgaria In 2001, Austrian slavistics professor Otto Kronsteiner recommended that Bulgaria adopt the Latin script in order to facilitate the country's accession to the European Union. This caused such a scandal that the Veliko Tarnovo University revoked the honorary degree it had previously awarded him (for supporting the Bulgarian viewpoint on the Macedonian language). However, in digital communication using computers and writing emails and SMS, the Latin script has been proposed to replace the Cyrillic. A Bulgarian Latin alphabet, the so-called shlyokavitsa (6liokavica), is already often employed for convenience for emails and SMS messages. Ciphers are used to denote Bulgarian sounds that cannot be represented with a single Latin character (for example, a "4" represents a "ч" because they look alike and the Bulgarian word for the cardinal number four, чѐтири čѐtiri, starts with a "ч"). The Kosovo Serbs have followed the practice of Cyrillic/Latin digraphia in the Republic of Serbia and continued to use both alphabets after the Kosovo War (1998–99) and the 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence. Article 2 of the 2006 Law on the Use of Languages states that “Albanian and Serbian and their alphabets are official languages of Kosovo and have equal status in Kosovo institutions,” but fails to specify which alphabets these are, as neither Latin nor Cyrillic is mentioned. In 2019, the then-Minister of Education and Science Kanybek Isakov expressed support for a switch to the Latin alphabet, which restarted a public debate about the benefits and drawbacks of such a change. Uyghur In western China, an auxiliary alphabet based on the Latin script was developed in 2006 for the Uyghur language, spoken mainly by the Uyghur people. North Macedonia The Macedonian language in its Cyrillic alphabet has been the official language of the Republic of Macedonia throughout the country and in its foreign relations since 1991. However, since the 2001 Albanian insurgency was ended by the Ohrid Agreement, the Constitution of Macedonia has been amended (Amendment V) to mandate the co-official use of the six minority languages and their respective alphabets in municipalities in which more than 20% of an ethnic minority resides. The six minority languages – Albanian, Turkish, Romani, Serbian, Bosnian and Aromanian – are (with the exception of Serbian) always officially written in Latin script in the municipalities where their speakers constitute a significant minority or even majority. In addition, Macedonian is occasionally written in Latin, especially in advertising. Montenegro There is ongoing discussion in Montenegro about how to label the majority language of Montenegro, which is mutually intelligible with the other standardised versions of Serbo-Croatian: Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. These debates focus on the perceived linguistic differences between Montenegrin and related variants, but also on national and political identification. Montenegro practices digraphia: there are two official Montenegrin alphabets, one Latin and one Cyrillic. In electoral campaigns after 2000, especially the 2006 independence referendum, Latin has come to symbolise closeness to Western countries, including Montenegro's historical ties to Venice, and independence from Serbia; on the other hand, Cyrillic is taken to signify unity with Serbia and closeness to the East. In general, proponents of calling the language "Montenegrin" – including the DPS-led governments (1990–2020) – tend to favour the Latin script, whereas supporters of "Serbian" prefer Cyrillic. In June 2016, an incident in which top students in primary and secondary schools for the first time since World War II received their "Luca" diplomas – named after Njegoš's poem – printed in the Latin alphabet, sparked political controversy. The opposition Socialist People's Party (SNP) accused Education Minister Predrag Bošković of "persecuting Cyrillic" and discriminating against pupils who use this script. The SNP was unsuccessful in forcing the minister to resign. The annual June reception of Latin-printed pupil's diplomas in schools continued to cause pro-Serbian organisations including new small opposition party True Montenegro to claim Cyrillic users were being 'discriminated' against, while Education Minister Damir Šehović stated that schools are obliged to issue Cyrillic diplomas, but only at the request of pupils’ parents. Serbia 'George Washington Street' sign in Belgrade (2014) Under the Constitution of Serbia of 2006, Cyrillic script is the only one in official use. Nonetheless, the Latin script is widely used. In May 2017, Minister of Culture and Information Vladan Vukosavljević proposed several measures to better support the Cyrillic script, which was "in danger of falling into disuse". He said there was not any kind of conspiracy going on against the Cyrillic alphabet, but rather that the spirit of the times, historical circumstances and the decades-long process of globalisation had gradually made Latin the world's dominant script. "Especially young people in Serbia are now mostly turning to Latin characters because of the media, the Internet and the logos of world brands." In August 2018, the Ministry of Culture proposed a law to that effect, obliging government institutions to use Cyrillic under the threat of fines, and setting up a Council for the Serbian Language to implement this suggested language policy. The ministry claimed that indifference towards which script to use was not “a culturally responsible position”, and complained that some people had come to “use the Latin script as a symbol of [their] openness and European affiliation”, arguing that Cyrillic was also one of the European Union's official writing systems Tatarstan (Russia) In 1999, the Russian Republic of Tatarstan proposed to convert the Turkic Tatar language to Latin script in order to bring it into the modern world of the Internet. There was opposition from both inside and outside Tatarstan, with Tatars arguing it would threaten their national identity and to sever their ties to the past. The Russian State Duma rejected the proposal. President Vladimir Putin said that a Tatar move from Cyrillic to Latin would 'threaten the unity of the Russian Federation'. In 2002, State Duma enacted a law that made Cyrillic the default script for all languages in all autonomous republics of Russia. As of 2020, Cyrillic remains the only official script in Tatarstan. Ukraine street plates written in Cyrillic and governmental standard of latinisation (2012). The upper plate-type above is found in the city centre and the lower one elsewhere. Ideas about Latinisation of the Ukrainian language can be traced as far back as the 17th century, when Ukrainian lands in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were under the influence of Polonisation. In the 19th century, the so-called Alphabet War occurred amongst linguists in Austrian Galicia, during which pro-Polish Ukrainophile scholars argued for Latinisation of Ukrainian (then called "Ruthenian"), while anti-Polish Galician Russophiles (or Moscophiles) sought closer cultural attachment to the Russian language and favoured the continued use of Cyrillic. In the 1920s and 1930s, Ukrainian was also part of the Latinisation in the Soviet Union, although this early internationalist Bolshevik policy would be reversed by Joseph Stalin. In 2014, the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine began promoting transition to the Latin script. In 2017, Kyiv-based journalist Stanislav Rechinsky reinvigorated the topic of Latinisation under the slogan "The more we differ from Russia - the better". In March 2018, Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin called for a discussion on the introduction of the Latin alphabet in parallel usage with the traditional Cyrillic one in Ukraine. He did so in response to the suggestion of Polish historian Ziemowit Szczerek. Ukraine's parliamentary committee on science and education responded, with first deputy chair Oleksandr Spivakovsky saying that today in Ukraine there are other, more important issues to work on than a transition to the Latin script. Similarly, philology professor Oleksandr Ponomariv was skeptical whether a full transition to Latin would benefit Ukraine, but did not rule out the parallel use of two alphabets. He pointed to the fact that the Serbian language is also expressed in both a Cyrillic and a Latin alphabet. Ukrainian philologist Oleksandr Polishchuk (2020) said that in the long term, it would be desirable 'to withdraw the Ukrainian language from the Kremlin's cultural space. However, now is not the best time for this.' He pointed to the rapid growth of Ukrainian-language books published in the 2010s, and that a switch to Latin would threaten this nascent and still vulnerable book market, as it 'may take decades for people to get used to the new alphabet.' In 2021, Oleksiy Danilov, the Ukrainian Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, also called for the country to switch to the Latin alphabet. I.I. Міnkovska (2019) stated: "Currently, in the world there are more than 20 Ukrainian-Latin alphabet transliteration standards that are used to a greater or lesser extent", "but none of them is approved at the Ukrainian official level." She argued that the government-used "Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine 2010" standard "does not meet the basic principles of transliteration in the best way", and other systems had other flaws. On 1 April 2022, shortly after the beginning of the ongoing Russian war with Ukraine, the DSTU 9112:2021 "Cyrillic-Latin transliteration and Latin-Cyrillic retransliteration of Ukrainian texts. Writing rules" (ДСТУ 9112:2021) was approved as State Standard of Ukraine. The standard is based on modified ISO 9:1995 standard and was developed by the Technical Committee 144 "Information and Documentation" of the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine. According to the SSTL, it could be used in future cooperation between the European Union and Ukraine, in which "Ukrainian will soon, along with other European languages, take its rightful place in multilingual natural language processing scenarios, including machine translation." Crimean Tatar In September 2021, the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers announced that it intends to approve a new alphabet of the Crimean Tatar language which would be based on the Latin script. == See also ==