An alternative spelling for taxi in Istanbul, Turkey.
Photo credit:Jurgen Luger/Flickr
In 1928, the Turkish government decided to change their alphabets.
So Turkey decided to adopt the Latin script, like hundreds of other languages that already do.
The old Arabic alphabet had nearly five hundred charactersa nightmare for a typesetter.
The new Turkish alphabet has only twenty nine characters.
In case you havent already noticed, these three alphabets are Q, W, and X.
The argument was that these characters could be spelled using the letters K, V and KS, respectively.
So taxi became taksi and Nowruz, the Persian New Year, became Nevruz.
Next came thedaunting taskof updating all public signs, hundreds of thousands of them across the country.
Newspapers and periodicals threw out the old typesets, official documents were updated, text books were reprinted.
Street corners were flooded with paper-covered primers teaching the new alphabets.
In Istanbul alone nearly two hundred thousand men and women enrolled in the classes.
President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk introducing the new Turkish alphabet to the people of Kayseri on 20 September 1928.
This statue shows President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk introducing the new Turkish alphabet to a child.
The statue stands in Istanbul.
He outright banned them, making their use in public an offense.
Similar charges were made in the past against government officials for making the same mistake.
A taksi in Istanbul, Turkey.
The Kurdish have their own language and their own script but until the 1990s these were banned as well.
The Kurds have a long history ofdiscrimination against themby the Turkish government.
Restricting their language was just another way of culturallyrepressing the minoritygroup.
For the past few years, the government has been relaxing the restrictions on learning and expressing in Kurdish.
In 2009, the state beganrunninga 24-hour Kurdish television station.
In 2012, Kurdish-language lessons, which was only possible in private institutions, becamean elective subjectin public schools.
