The Karakalpak Alphabet: How Four Scripts Erased a Culture

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore one of the most dramatic cultural erasures in Soviet history: the forced alphabet changes imposed on the Karakalpak people. Over just 50 years, Karakalpak was written in Arabic, Latin, a modified Cyrillic, and finally a unified Cyrillic — each change severing the population from its literary heritage, religious texts, and historical memory. They discuss the 1928 Latinization campaign under the Soviet Union's ‘korenizatsiya’ policy, the abrupt 1940 shift to Cyrillic ordered by Stalin, and the long-term consequences: a generation that couldn't read its own grandparents' books, the loss of medieval manuscripts, and the struggle to revive the Latin script after independence in 1991. The episode zooms in on the Karakalpak linguist and poet Berdaq, whose 19th-century epics are now taught in three different scripts depending on the textbook. Lucas and Luna also touch on the parallel destruction of the Arabic-script education system in madrasas across Khiva and Nukus, and the quiet resistance of elders who kept teaching the old alphabet at home. This is a story about how writing systems become weapons — and how a culture survives when its alphabet keeps changing. #Karakalpak #Alphabet #SovietLinguistics #Berdaq #Cyrillic #Latinization #Korenizatsiya #Stalin #Nukus #Khiva #ArabicScript #CentralAsia #LanguagePolicy #CulturalErasure #Uzbekistan #FexingoHistory #History #WritingSystems #SilkRoad #TimuridEmpire Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo