In connection with the collapse of the USSR, in the newly formed republics in which the Turkic languages were the main ones, the ideas of Pan-Turkism became popular again, and, as a consequence, so did the movement for the restoration of the Latin alphabet. In order to unify, and at the initiative of Turkey in November 1991, an international scientific symposium was held in Istanbul on the development of a unified alphabet for the Turkic languages. It was completely based on the Turkish alphabet, but with the addition of some missing letters: ä, ñ, q, w, x. As a result, the alphabet consisted of 34 letters, 29 of which were taken from Turkish.