AHC: Make Finnish and Estonian use the cyrillic alphabet

With a POD in the 1700's have Finnish and Estonian use the Cyrillic alphabet. How would that change history and would they ever change it in the future?
 
I don't see this as being too hard. Russia had plenty of opportunities to conquer Finland and Estonia from Sweden from the 1700s and forward.

It wasn't until the 19th century that written Finnish was used outside religious situations. So basically, Russia conquers Finland, forces the Finnish bible to be rewritten in Cyrillic, there you go. I imagine something similar would happen to Estonian.

How to get Finland and Estonia to retain the Cyrillic alphabet to present day? Too many butterflies to say for certain, but I don't think there would be any resistance to Cyrillic writing as long as Russia remains a respected country, unlike the pariah it is now.
 
Why would the Russians force the Finns to use the Cyrillic alphabet? Russification was mostly a late development in the Russian Empire, and anyway it usually consisted of pressuring peoples to use Russian, not to write their native languages in Cyrillic. (Polish was not written in Cyrillic, for example, though I think Nicholas I toyed with the idea.) Even Stalin, while insisting that Soviet Turkic languages be written in Cyrillic, generally did not have languages that had traditionally been written in Latin (Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian) switch to Cyrillic. (The only real exception was the very short-lived Karelian Cyrillic of 1937-9 which had precedents in a few nineteenth century prayer translations, etc. Writing Moldavian in Cyrillic was not really an exception, because prior to the nineteenth century Romanian had often been written in Cyrillic.)
 
You need to shift the Estonian National Awakening away from the Baltic Germans and into the hands of the Baltic Russians, which requires a liberal mindset of the Russians in the region for that to work.
 
I don't see this as being too hard. Russia had plenty of opportunities to conquer Finland and Estonia from Sweden from the 1700s and forward.

It wasn't until the 19th century that written Finnish was used outside religious situations. So basically, Russia conquers Finland, forces the Finnish bible to be rewritten in Cyrillic, there you go. I imagine something similar would happen to Estonian.

How to get Finland and Estonia to retain the Cyrillic alphabet to present day? Too many butterflies to say for certain, but I don't think there would be any resistance to Cyrillic writing as long as Russia remains a respected country, unlike the pariah it is now.

Well, Russia DID conquer Estonia in the early eighteenth century, and kept it afterwards until 1917 with relative ease. However, no Russian government before Stalin showed any sustained interest in promoting Cyrillic among minorities who weren't using it already, and even Stalin usually did not force it on groups where significant literacy already existed in a alphabetic script belonging to a tradition connected to Christianity. Thing is, as you note, both Finnish and Estonian, while possessing a literate tradition tied to the Reformation, were not particularly important as written languages, and Tsarist Russia had little reason to promote literacy in either (they did so with Finnish to some extent, due to the autonomous status of Finland and desire to weaken the role of Swedish; but the logical thing to do then was to rely on the already existing Finnish written tradition in the Latin script, rather than starting it all over again). In Estonia, Russian rule relied on a "German" elite that used German, or secondarily Russian, as the prestige language and had limited interest in whatever the peasantry spoke; Russia had no reason to empower the Estonian speaking underclasses to adopt literacy of any kind, and a different sort of Russian power more hostile to Baltic Germans would have possibly opted for Russification directly. Encouraging an Estonian linguistic nationalism was asking for trouble regardless of the script (ok, they got trouble anyway).
 
You need to shift the Estonian National Awakening away from the Baltic Germans and into the hands of the Baltic Russians, which requires a liberal mindset of the Russians in the region for that to work.
The Estonian national awakening was explicitly against the Baltic Germans, the long time feudal rulers in Estonia. In fact, for some time Russia supported this movement to weaken the Baltic Germans - including expanding the usage of Estonian written of course in the Latin alphabet.
 
It's worth noting that christianisation came with a church backed alphabet/script. So to get the Finnics using Cyrillic having them converted from paganism to eastern orthodox would work.
 
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