ARTICLE Telegraphy, Typography, and the Alphabet: The Origins of Alphabet Revolutions in the Russo-Ottoman Space Ulug Kuzuoglu Department of History, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA Corresponding author. Email: ulugkuzuoglu@gmail.com (Received 16 August 2019; revised 2 December 2019; accepted 18 January 2020) Abstract This paper explores the history of the alphabet revolutions in the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, beginning in the 1860s and culminating with the new Turkish alphabet and the Soviet latinization movement in the 1920s. Unlike earlier worksthat have treated these movements separately, this article traces the origins of the alphabet revolutions to the 19th-century communications revolution, when the telegraph and movable metal type challenged the existing modes of knowledge production and imposed new epistemologies of writ- ing on the Muslims in the Russo-Ottoman space. This article examines the media technologies of the era and the cross-imperial debates surrounding various alphabet proposals that predated latinization and suggests that the history of language reform in the Russo-Ottoman world be reevaluated as a product of a modernizing information age that eventually changed the entire linguistic landscape of Eurasia. Keywords: alphabet; language reform; Ottoman Empire; Russian Empire The 1920s were the global age of alphabet revolutions. Although in the history of the Middle East the most famous of them was the Turkish alphabet revolution that replaced the Arabic alphabet with a lat- inized one in 1928, the revolutionary fervor was present across Eurasia. In 1924, Azerbaijan was the first Soviet Socialist Republic to latinize its alphabet; and two years later, the future of the Arabic alphabet was the most contested issue at the First Turcology Congress, which convened in Baku under the auspices of the Central Committee of the USSR. In 1928, a mixed group of Russian and Turkic scholars invented the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (unifitsirovannyi novyi tiurkskii alfavit; UNTA) to replace all Arabic alpha- bets with a latinized one. “Latinization,” as Lenin allegedly said, “[was] the Great Revolution in the East!” 1 Quickly, the latinization movement spread even further, as the UNTA became the basis of the Mongolian, Kurdish, and Persian Latin alphabets as well. Even the first Chinese Latin alphabet, the mother of con- temporary pinyin, was a reformed version of the UNTA. The simultaneous alphabet revolutions in Turkey and the USSR in the 1920s, in short, reverberated globally. The purpose of this article is to revise the extant paradigms of the origins of these alphabet revolutions that have hitherto been treated separately, mostly due to Cold War politics. The first wave of scholarship on alphabet reforms and revolutions in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, for instance, treated the movement as merely an ongoing effort at Westernization and secularization. 2 In contrast, the scholarship on latinization in the Soviet Union has largely been defined as a product of Soviet colo- nialism and imperialism that allegedly sought to divide and conquer the Turkic nations. 3 More recent scholarship on the subject has correctly challenged these earlier works, although it has continued to © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press 1 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 187. 2 Niyazi Berkes, Turkiye’de Cagdaslasma (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1973); Hamid Algar, “Malkum Khan, Akhundzada and the Proposed Reform of the Arabic Alphabet,” Middle Eastern Studies 5, no. 2 (May 1969): 116–30. 3 Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Quelquejay, The Evolution of the Muslim Nationalities of the USSR and Their Linguistic Problems, trans. Geoffrey Wheeler (London: Central Asian Research Center, 1961). International Journal of Middle East Studies (2020), 1–19 doi:10.1017/S0020743820000264 at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743820000264 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Columbia University - Law Library, on 23 Jun 2020 at 11:51:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available