Year-old Latin script still baffles Azeris

By Chloe Arnold In Baku

A year ago the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan changed its alphabet from the Cyrillic to the Latin.

Overnight, newspapers, magazines and books were forced to change their scripts.

School children say the new alphabet is much easier to read, but not everyone agrees.

The road signs have all been changed and billboards and posters are now in the Latin ABC.

Writing or printing anything in the old script is a criminal offence.

Superficially at least the alphabet change, introduced on 1 August last year, has been a success.

Logistical problems

But scratch below the surface, and the problems start to appear.

Azeri President Heydar Aliyev called for a ban on the Russian alphabet to distance his former Soviet republic from Russia and cement its ties with the West.

But he forgot to think about the logistics. Several newspapers disappeared because they could not afford to change their printing presses in time for the deadline.

Young people are coping because textbooks in the Latin script have been phased in over the last 10 years.

But older people are mystified by the new alphabet - there has been no re-education programme to teach them how to read it.

And businesses are still trying to work out how to produce the upside-down letter 'e', that is unique to the Azeri alphabet, on their computers.