Letters Q, W, And X Were Once Illegal in Turkey

An alternative spelling for taxi in Istanbul, Turkey. Photo credit: Jürgen Luger/Flickr In 1928, the Turkish government decided to change their alphabets. The old Turkish writing system used the Arabic script, which was so foreign in appearance that it was extremely difficult to master. Many foreigners who had lived in Turkey for years and could speak Turkish fluently still couldn’t spell or read street signs. Young children took longer to learn to read the Turkish language compared to other languages based on the Latin script. So Turkey decided to adopt the Latin script, like hundreds of other languages that already do. “The Turkish language has been a prisoner for centuries and it is now casting off its chains,” declared President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Latin alphabets, he explained, was going to make the Turkish language intelligible to the western world, which will help the country move forward along with the more progressive nations. The old Arabic alphabet had nearly five hundred characters—a nightmare for a typesetter. The new Turkish alphabet has only twenty nine characters. A B C Ç D E F G Ğ H I İ J K L M N O Ö P R S Ş T U Ü V Y Z It looks similar to the English alphabet because both uses the same Latin script. A few special characters (the ones with diacritics) were added to accommodate the nuances of Turkish pronunciation, while three alphabets the administration felt were redundant were dropped. In case you haven’t already noticed, these three alphabets are Q, W, and X. The argument was that these characters could be spelled using the letters K, V and KS, respectively. So “taxi” became “taksi” and “Nowruz”, the Persian New Year, became “Nevruz”. Next came the daunting task of updating all public signs, hundreds of thousands of them across the country. Street names, shops, bus stops, business establishments, railway stations, all had to be spelled out using the new alphabets.