Russian Tatars not allowed to use Latin alphabet

November 16, 2004

&mdash; Russia's highest court has judged that living in the federal state of  may not apply the  to their language without permission from the federal government in Moscow. The Tatars had instituted legal proceedings because their differs greatly from, the BBC reports.

The law banning all alphabets but has been one in a long range of regulations and restrictions, claimed by officials to be designed to protect Russia's linguistic heritage. The Russian federal government has been cited to consider the use of a non-Cyrillic alphabet by federal states a 'separatist tendency'.