languagehat.com : Q LEGALIZED IN TURKEY.
The Turkish Alphabet Law of 11/1/1928 was aimed at shifting Turkish from Arabic-based to Latin-based orthography, and it was quite effective in suppressing the use of the Ottoman script. But it has also been used to suppress Kurdish, historically spoken by 10-25% of the country’s population.
But the post is especially worth reading for the passage from Gravity’s Rainbow Mark cites (“ƣ seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive. The distinction between it and your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never learn to appreciate…”); if you enjoy that as much as I do, you will want to read the much more extensive series of quotes from Pynchon’s masterpiece in this nine-year-old Log post (and a quote from a different section at this eight-year-old LH post)—and, hopefully, the book itself.
I guess they were fed up with always losing at Scrabble.