LE PASSAGE DE L'ALPHABET ARABE À L’ALPHABET LATIN: QUELQUES CAS AUDELÀ DE LA RÉFORME DE MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATÜRK

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is known as the man who led Turkey to the adoption of the Latin alphabet for Turkish, written with the Arabic script until 1928. This reform was supposed to facilitate literacy and to help Turkey on the path to modernization. Nevertheless, the idea was not new, it had been debated since the years 1860 in Turkey and in Azerbaijan, and the reform had been adopted elsewhere in Asia before. Around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the same process was launched in Africa, in a very different political context. Finally, the Arabic language itself happened to be written with the Latin alphabet, again in a very specific context