Central Asia: Changing the Writing on the Wall?

The Central Asian countries — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — are debating whether to switch from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. The change would make the countries less isolated in an age when Western banking, computers and the Internet commonly use the Latin alphabet. Moreover, by dropping the Cyrillic alphabet, the Central Asian countries would be casting off a vestige of the Soviet era.