The Open Atlas Blog

When I was younger I was really fascinated to learn that Quechua was still spoken today. You might know Quechua as the language of the Incan Empire, or the French sporting goods company. It’s a fascinating language with evidentiality markers, bipersonal verb conjugations and lots of other features that are catnip for a grammar nerd like me. I could go on for days, but that would be missing the point I want to make here, which is that Quechua isn’t a language. Well that's a bit misleading. I should say that Quechua isn't a single language.  In reality, Quechua is a term that people often use to refer to a whole group of related languages spoken throughout the Andes region of South America, many varieties of which are not mutually  intelligible with each other. A rough sketch of where 'Quechua' is spoken A linguist much more informed than I am once explained it to me that using the term Quechua the way we do was like calling all the West Slavic languages (thi...

Morocco gained independence from France in 1956 and since then the question of language has been continuously debated. Nationalists wanted to elevate Arabic with many moving to eliminate French entirely. The goal of Arabisation was put forth and by 1970 primary schools were taught completely in Arabic. Conversely, STEM classes (science, technical, engineering, maths) continued to be taught in French.  In 1983, while Morocco was having a resurgence of Arab nationalism, the government changed the language of STEM instruction from French to Arabic in an effort to further the nation's Arabization.  University was another matter however, with almost all STEM university courses remaining in French. Then i n 2020, that decision was reversed. An if you've read this far and had ideas about only French and Arabic, that's understandable. In the national discourse, that's how the question is framed - as a binary between the two languages. But Morocco has many more than t...

We generally don't think about the use of an alphabet as a political statement. In fact for many people, a language using a particular writing system seems more like a given than anything else. It seems obvious that Bulgarian uses Cyrillic and Korean uses Hangul - that's what tradition calls for and inertia keeps in place. I'll use any excuse to show Korean script For many countries though, a lphabets and writing systems can and do change and very often the choice can carry a lot of political weight to it. Kazakhstan and the trend of Central Asia In 2017, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan at the time signed a decree that pledged to switch the Kazakh language form the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. The transition plan is meant to be completed by 2025. This will not be first time for Kazakh to take on a new alphabet. In fact it would be the third time in less than 100 years. The written form of Kazakhstan has taken a rather circuitous pat...