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The question of why anyone uses whichever writing system often has a simple answer given by the community that uses it. For those who switched in the past 500 years, the answer is usually “it’s much better than the horrible one we had before, that someone foreign had imposed on us”.

This answer is usually incorrect. But the question is also a bit superficial. We might want to ask these questions instead.

• What did you use before?
• Why was that used?
• Why did you decide to change?
• What did you change to?

The third question looks like the closest to the one in the title. We’ll get to answering it in general.

Before you stop reading because you don’t really care about Somalia or why they use the latin alphabet there, this article isn’t actually about Somalia. By the way, did you even know that they use the latin alphabet over there? We’ll talk about it later. Important question first.

Why is the latin alphabet so common?

Depending on where you’re born, the answer to this question might be “because of America”, “because of the Roman Empire” or whatever. We need to remember a few things. First, the diffusion of the latin alphabet is older than America (or England, if that was your second guess). Second, in the Roman Empire, it wasn’t used everywhere¹.

The latin alphabet is the result of a few iterations on writing systems in use in the italian peninsula, used for several languages (Etruscan, Oscan, Latin, and others). It was exclusively upper case and much as we want to believe that it was standardised (A to Z, with all the letters in between), it was not.

Through the centuries of the empire, the latin alphabet came to be used for Latin exclusively, as all the local languages in the west either got extinct or had extremely limited written tradition². After the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, the latin alphabet had a single custodian which became responsible for its world-wide diffusion.

The Catholic Church also did good things

Being a monk in the middle ages must have been a lot of fun. Monks got up to many tasks, from making beer³ to studying philosophy and other works. But the existence of these secluded monks copying books by hand is definitely something that many remember from school, and it’s also the reason why books were incredibly expensive at the time.

In the so-called dark ages, the Church was basically the carrier of culture in Western Europe. The rest of the world had been moving on, with many newer communities standardising new alphabets. The Arabic alphabet was tied to the rise of Islam, and where Islam spread so did the alphabet, replacing a lot of scripts along the way⁴.

With the rise of kingdoms somehow tied to the Church, there was no discussion on which writing system to use for those languages. No language was standardised at the time, be it medieval German or Portuguese, but they were always written with the only alphabet everyone knew: the latin alphabet, with suitable modifications. In the south, ch came to be commonly used as a digraph, with different pronunciations carried on to this day (compare French, Spanish and Italian). In the north, the vowel system was much more complicated than Latin’s, so in lack of vowel symbols, some got invented, e.g. å or æ or ü.

Said kingdoms started venturing very far away starting from the Age of Discovery (a term that is no longer politically correct), and this, later, gave birth to writing systems such as pinyin, the modern Vietnamese alphabet, and, much, much later, those of most languages of subsaharan Africa.

Before you think that this is the answer to why everyone moved to the Latin alphabet, remember that this summary only gives a brief explanation about its diffusion. After all, germanic and, later, slavic people, didn’t know anything else. Yes, there were older alphabets there, but really, christianity taught most of those people to read – those who actually learned: literacy stayed very low.

Other peoples did know something else. What did they know and why did they feel the need for a change?

The 1600s: East and South East Asia

To oversimplify, East and South East Asia can be split in two or three categories. The so-called Sinosphere, and the rest, which was more Hindu or Muslim influenced (or both).

The jesuits tried to enter the Sinosphere. Really, really hard. They wrote a lot of books and in many cases their legacy is very respected⁵. But with one single exception, they didn’t manage to warm China and Japan’s hearts with the love of our lord and saviour the latin alphabet.

Even in Vietnam – the one single exception – the change happened long after Alexandre de Rhodes’⁶ death.

The area outside of Chinese influence had a very mixed bag of results. The interesting fact is that the (major) languages that adopted the latin alphabet all belong to the same family, as a result of Dutch, Spanish and English colonialism in the region. This is how Philippine and Malayo-Polinesian languages got to the writing system they have today.

Nations and empires that stayed within the Hindu and Buddhist influence sphere and, just like in Europe, had a whole class of priests and monks who acted as custodians of their culture, kept their own alphabet. This is the case of Thai, Burmese, Khmer, among many.

The 1800s: Central Asia and Pan-Turkism

Most Turkic people converted to Islam, apart from those who were too far north for the message of the Prophet to reach their cold, cold hearts⁷. The extent of whichever Turkic language was used in writing depended, as usual, on the status of said language in the country, and it was very uneven. Chagatay, for example, was very widely used in the area around modern Uzbekistan since Timurid times, while the Turkic languages of Persia were a mixed bag. Regardless, all these languages were written with the Arabic alphabet, once again, for the few people who were able to read.

Once the Russian empire started swallowing most of them, at least in sheer number of languages, they started writing dictionaries in their own, superior alphabet, according to them, of course. This, again, according to them, increased literacy – or simply brought literacy, depending on how patronising the contemporary commentator wanted to be.

In the 1800s though, something else was happening. Western Europe had become the dominant continent with the dominant culture, at the very least as far as weapons were concerned. But with the industrial revolution it was inevitable for most ideologues and tyrants all over the world to look at Europe and everything European as modern and progressive. This modernisation pack included a few things, from industrial-scale ethnic cleansing to nationalism, through, of course, the Latin Alphabet.

New-born Turkey was one of the first new countries to switch in the name of “modernity”, and some ideologues went as far as creating a standardised latin pan-turkic alphabet, to be adapted for all the languages of the Turkic peoples. Political union was the end goal, but language was a key part of it.

Ironically, even long after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Pan-turkism seems to be more like a nice dream than a reality: Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have decided to switch to a latin alphabet, but instead of mimicking Turkey’s or grabbing the pan-Turkic one, they made up their own. Kyrgyz is still late to the party, and Uyghur uses a modified Arabic script, similarly to the equally recent Sorani Kurdish script.

The 1900s: Those we had left behind

I think until now the answer to “why does one decide to ditch whichever system they had in favour of the latin alphabet” is more or less clear, with exceptions: the latin alphabet is seen by the new converts as a breath of fresh air, replacing the old writing system imposed by the ancien régime, the previous tyrants who wanted us to be something we were not.

This is definitely what happened in Vietnam, where the building of a national identity went hand in hand with late 1800s ideologies. Ho Chi Minh (not his real name) personified the new identity of Vietnam, socialist, peasant, free, literate, Vietnamese. Breaking away from the shackles of both the old-fashioned Chinese culture, and the colonial regime. Ironically, it’s the colonial regime itself that opened the freezer and took out Alexandre de Rhodes’ dictionary and started teaching Vietnamese kids to read, but this is one of many examples of Vietnam’s “embracing of modernity” regardless of where said “modernity” comes from. We will ignore for now that what is now Vietnam actually had an immense linguistic variety and the birth of the nation wasn’t kind at all to those who were not ethnic Vietnamese.

In Indonesia a similar phenomenon happened. The latin alphabet, to write Malay, which is not called Malay in Indonesia for nationalist reasons, as briefly mentioned before, reached the region thanks to the Portuguese and the Dutch. The Indonesian nationalist movement then used Malay to spread self-determination in an extremely multi-ethnic region, and, with it, Islam⁸. Like in Vietnam, the ends justify the means, and as foreign and, worse, non-muslim as it can be, the latin alphabet served nationalism very well. And, incidentally and not without irony, Islam.

Jawi, the old Arabic script used for Malay, is somehow more common in Malaysia. This is likely because Malaysia was born as a multi-ethnic country, albeit with a strong focus on Malay, and the push for unity via a single identity was slightly weaker. Nevertheless, the latin alphabet dwarfs Jawi in Malaysia too.

Latin superiority?

A note about the narratives pushed in a few of those countries (notably Turkey and Vietnam) about the switch. Vietnamese is a highly tonal language and Turkish has a lot of vowels. Marking the vowels and tones in one is as useful as marking the vowels in the other, especially coming from, in one case, a script that is not phonetic at all (Chinese)⁹, or one that is phonetic but has very few vowels (Arabic). The logical step from this to the supremacy of the latin script over both Arabic and Chinese systems is straightforward. It’s also wrong. The Chinese script has been used across the ages to express tonal languages with complex vowel systems – Cantonese being close to Vietnamese in that regard¹⁰.

The debate for Vietnam is over but we must notice that Korea¹¹, Japan and Vietnam all took different paths to move away from the Chinese alphabet, and their societies have had no issues developing – and if we add Taiwan to this, traditional Chinese characters are also no obstacle to “progress”. This shows that there isn’t a clear winner and arguments of superiority are just fuel for the state ideology.

Okay what about Somalia then?

It’s almost boring to answer this question now. But The interesting fact is that Somalia had no national identity to spread as the territory which resulted from the combination of English and Italian Somaliland, was very homogeneous. Arabic was the most commonly written language though, and Somali wasn’t written. When it started being written, they used the Arabic alphabet.

But Somalia’s Sukarno¹², Siad Barre, learned to be a tyrant in extensive trainings with the Italian military. The Somali alphabet was not calqued from the italian one (although it’s close enough), but just like Vietnam and Indonesia, military leaders need their particular brand of progress, which, as you’re probably very bored of reading, comes with latin letters.

Fun fact: the letter C, which is usually the one with the wildest pronunciations in every language, is used in Somali to write the arabic ayn¹³, so the word “arabic”, in Somali, is carabi – and the name Ali is, of course, Cali.

Surely we didn’t cover the whole world

There are more places, and it’s not correct to assume that the latin alphabet was always imposed by genocidal tyrants. For many regions it’s simply the alphabet of the mothership, like most Native American languages, north¹⁴ and south. This doesn’t just apply to the latin script, it also applies to pretty much every country that has local languages with a much weaker written tradition. We’ve seen Russia’s example before, but a similar, more recent one, is Japan using katakana to write the Ainu language. Vietnamese and Turkish also inspired other alphabets that started being used to codify, for instance, the Muong and the Kurmanji Kurdish languages, respectively.

The rest of Sub-saharan Africa followed the same fate, with exceptions¹⁵, mostly as a result of colonialism but in many places simply because many languages started a written tradition when latin-based printing became much more accessible.

This is probably the final trading ship that made many people forget that the latin letters have been brought by the Europeans using more than just books. Many now-widespread languages had a very small corpus until the end of the 20th century. Especially when it comes to sub-saharan Africa, the need for literacy dwarfed ideological considerations. Almost everyone who learned to use a phone to text in the 2000s – outside of Russia and the Sinosphere - did so using latin letters, for whichever language, from Hindi to Georgian, from Greek to Persian.

Nowadays Unicode, developed input methods, and modern printers (plus the web of course) help everyone write and visualise characters in whichever writing system, making any potential switch away from the evil latin alphabet much easier than it used to be. Nevertheless, for many very different cultures, its convenience has been undeniable, and at least within its own birthplace, it’s hard to see a future without it.