1521: (Some) Reasons for Official Writing Systems Feb 11, 2019

Classifying something as a language can be political at times, such as with calling Croatian and Serbian distinct, but this is also true of writing systems. A whole system of writing can change the way that people consider a language. For instance, to make Kazakhstan less culturally russified, the government decided to use a Latin-based script instead of a Cyrillic one in the last few years, whereas China uses the same writing—let alone writing system—for all Chinese dialects even if they aren't really mutually intelligible. Sometimes this is done more-or-less accidentally however as is the case with Laotian and Thai, which are mutually intelligible but have different writing systems.
See more on censorship in the new video: https://youtu.be/IFwACamZhmM