Turkish language
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk changed it to the Latin alphabet from Arabic alphabet. The Turkish government justified the move as making Turkish much easier to learn to increase literacy. The literacy rate indeed increased greatly after the reform, from around 10.5% (in 1927) to over 90% (today). Some say that the move was also to distance the country from the Ottoman Empire, whose documents can no longer be read except by a few scholars.