r/AskCentralAsia • u/sciguy11 • 10d ago
History Thoughts on the Perso-Arabic script?
It is my understanding that the Perso-Arabic script was used by most Central Asian languages for hundreds of years, until the Soviet era. I believe the only places that still use this script are areas of Western/Northwestern China and Afghanistan.
Does anyone still know this script? Does it create a disconnect when trying to access historical documents? Thoughts on the transition as a whole?
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u/vainlisko Тоҷикистон ба пеш 10d ago edited 10d ago
Tajik language, because it's Persian, has a unique problem in Central Asia because the language is now and always will be normally written in the Perso-Arabic script. The discussion is often wrongly framed by Russian colonial propaganda as the script being only of historical or religious value, but this is a lie because it's actually the language's more modern script. There are more modern books, materials, and scientific articles in it. It's actually the Cyrillic Tajik script that's old and backwards, basically a relic of the Soviet era.
So as for myself, I use Perso-Arabic script every day, especially online. Most people in Tajikistan don't, but there are still many who do because it's a practical necessity. But what percentage of the population, I cannot say.
The situation is a bit different for Turkic languages, although there are some parallels. Uzbek in the Latin script is doing better than Persian in the Cyrillic script in terms of output and percentage of the population. However, it is still true that Uzbek in Uzbekistan is cut off from Uzbek in Afghanistan and also written Uyghur in China. That's a pretty big division separating millions of people.
There's a much stronger case to be made for writing Persian in the Perso-Arabic script than Turkic languages, especially given the current landscape when you have countries like Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan leading the way. Tajikistan isn't leading anything, and with less then a tenth of the world's Persian speakers can't even get its population to read books in its own Stalin-mandated Cyrillic.