Siyad resolved the script question that earlier governments had avoided
Evidence
In 1972 General Siyad’s government took the bold and sensible decision of adopting the roman alphabet as the official script for the national language, Somali. The question of whether to choose this script, with its secular implications, or the less suitable Arabic alphabet, favoured by many pro-Arab Somalis, had always proved too delicate for previous governments to resolve effectively. Once the decision had been taken it proved popular, and there is little doubt that the urban literacy campaign of 1973 was highly successful. Officials were sent on crash courses with the inducement that, if they failed their literacy exams, they might lose their jobs. Adult literacy classes, which lacked this sanction, drew large and enthusiastic attendances from the most educationally deprived sections of the urban population. — I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali_ Nation…, 526
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader historical question of Somali orthography and language politics across the Horn, and to post-1991 debates over the script. — connects to: Siyad resolved the long-stalled Somali script question by choosing the roman alphabet
Related
- Siyad resolved the long-stalled Somali script question by choosing the roman alphabet (similarity 0.94)
- Somalis devised their own scripts, especially Osmaniya, before Roman-script literacy (similarity 0.85)
- Early Roman-script Somali publications met hostile popular reaction and were withdrawn (similarity 0.85)
- The Osmaniya script was later adopted as a nationalist symbol of Somali achievement. (similarity 0.84)
- Lack of a national Somali script forced continued use of colonial languages (similarity 0.83)
- Somalia still lacked a settled written script for its language in 1957 (similarity 0.83)
- The League remained divided over which script should write Somali. (similarity 0.82)
- A 1920 script invention made Somali fully writable for the first time. (similarity 0.81)
- An indigenous Somali script bolstered national consciousness against Arabic (similarity 0.80)