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The Alphabet War , also called the Alphabet Blizzard , was a controversy in the 19th century among Galician Ukrainians. It concerned attempts to Latinize the Ukrainian alphabet.
The name may be derived from the discussions that took place in the early 1830s about the orthography of the Slovenian language ― the term was first used by M. Chop in an article of the same name, published July 27, 1833 in the magazine "Illyrisches Blatt". It is still unclear when the term was first used in the context of linguistic and orthographic discussions in Galicia.
The first stage of the Alphabet War began in 1834 after the publication of a work by Joseph Lozynskyi in which it was argued that Latin letters, in contrast to the "dead" Cyrillic alphabet, could more fully and accurately reflect the nature of the Ukrainian language. Its second stage began in 1859 after the publication of a proposal by Josef Jireček to remake the Ukrainian writing system on the basis of the Czech alphabet. Discussions of the alphabet question lasted until the 1880s, but fell in and out of public discourse.
The competition between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets acquired the features of an interethnic confrontation between Poles and Ukrainians. For Ukrainians, Cyrillic was a symbol of identity: first religious identity, as Cyrillic was associated with the Eastern Orthodox liturgical rite, and then national identity. Both sides did not take into account the fact that Latin conveyed the peculiarities of Western Ukrainian speech much more accurately.