Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the newly-independent Republic of Kazakhstan allowed the old Latin alphabet to be used, but continued to use Cyrillic as the main alphabet. In 2006, president Nursultan Nazarbayev started a project to introduce a standard form of the Latin alphabet as the official script of his country. A version of the new Latin alphabet, which used apostrophes for certain sounds, was created in April 2017, but was replaced with another one in February 2018 which instead uses diacritics on certain letters. If all goes as planned, the Cyrillic alphabet will be fully replaced with Latin by 2025.