Turkey Switches to a Latin Alphabet

On 1 November 1928, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey approved Law Number 1353, titled Acceptance and Application of Turkish Letters. When it was published in the Official Gazette on 3 November, the statute began replacing the Arabic script, which had been used to write Turkish for centuries, setting deadlines that required the new letters in state business from 1 January 1929 and allowed some older forms until 1930. In its place, the state enacted a new writing system based on the Latin alphabet, modified with distinct characters such as dotted and undotted versions of the letter I, as well as Ç, Ö, Ü, Ş, and Ğ, while assigning specific phonetic values like the English J sound to the letter C.

Arguments for such a transformation had a long history. Critics had long held that the Arabic script, well suited to Arabic, fit Turkish poorly. Because Turkish possessed vowel sounds that Arabic characters failed to distinguish consistently, a single letter could stand for several different sounds, while the script retained separate letters for consonants that Turkish speakers pronounced identically. Proponents argued that this mismatch created unnecessary barriers to mass literacy and public instruction.