Latinisation in the Soviet Union
Latinisation or latinization was a campaign in the Soviet Union to adopt the Latin script during the 1920s and 1930s. Latinisation aimed to replace Cyrillic and traditional writing systems for all languages of the Soviet Union with Latin or Latin-based systems, or introduce them for languages that did not have a writing system. Latinisation began to slow in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and a Cyrillisation campaign was launched instead. Latinization had effectively ended by the 1940s. Most of these Latin alphabets are defunct and several contain multiple letters that do not have Unicode support as of 2023.
A Kazakh-language newspaper written in the Latin script from 1937. Published in Almaty.
A Tajik newspaper in Latin script from 1936. Published in Tajik SSR, USSR
The romanization of the Russian language, aside from its primary use for including Russian names and words in text written in a Latin alphabet, is also essential for computer users to input Russian text who either do not have a keyboard or word processor set up for inputting Cyrillic, or else are not capable of typing rapidly using a native Russian keyboard layout (JCUKEN). In the latter case, they would type using a system of transliteration fitted for their keyboard layout, such as for English QWERTY keyboards, and then use an automated tool to convert the text into Cyrillic.
Pavel Datsyuk (Cyrillic: Павел Дацюк), a former NHL and international ice hockey player, wearing a sweater with Latin characters
A street sign in Russia with the name of a street shown in Cyrillic and Latin characters