Nazarbayev argued that the "Kazakh language and culture have been devastated" during the period of Soviet rule, and that ending the use of Cyrillic is useful in re-asserting national identity. The new Latin alphabet is also a step to weaken the traditional Russian influence on the country, as the Russian language is the country's second official language. The initial proposed Latin alphabet tried to avoid digraphs (such as "sh", "ch") and diacritics (such as "ä" or "ç"). In fact, President Nazarbayev had expressly stated that the new alphabet should contain "no hooks or superfluous dots". Instead, the new alphabet, which is based on a transliteration of Cyrillic into Latin letters, would have used apostrophes to denote those Kazakh letters where there was no direct Latin equivalent. It is similar to the Karakalpak Latin alphabet and the Uzbek alphabet.