not being a Turkic language. The literacy campaign was successful, with near-universal literacy being achieved by the 1950s. As part of the "russification" of Central Asia, the Cyrillic script was introduced in the late 1930s. The alphabet remained Cyrillic until the end of the 1980s with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In 1989, with the growth in Tajik nationalism, a law was enacted declaring Tajik the state language. In addition, the law officially equated Tajik with Persian, placing the word Farsi (the endonym for the Persian language) after Tajik. The law also called for a gradual reintroduction of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. The Persian alphabet was introduced into education and public life, although the banning of the Islamic Renaissance Party in 1993 slowed down the adoption. In 1999, the word Farsi was removed from the state-language law. the de facto standard in use was the Cyrillic alphabet and , only a very small part of the population could read the Persian alphabet. Variants The letters of the major versions of the Tajik alphabet are presented below, along with their phonetic values. There is also a comparative table below. Persian alphabet A variant of the Persian alphabet (technically an abjad) is used to write Tajik. In the Tajik version, as with all other versions of the Arabic script, with the exception of (alef), vowels are not given unique letters, but rather optionally indicated with diacritic marks. Latin The Latin script was introduced after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in order to facilitate an increase in literacy and distance the language from Islamic influence. Only lowercase letters were found in the first versions of the Latin variant, between 1926 and 1929. A slightly different version used by Jews speaking the Bukhori dialect included three extra characters for phonemes not found in the other dialects: , , and . (Note that and are switched relative to their usage in the Turkish alphabet, which has formed the basis for other Latin scripts in the former Soviet Union.) The unusual character is called Gha and represents the phoneme . The character is found in Yañalif, the Common Turkic Alphabet in which most non-Slavic languages of the Soviet Union were written until the late 1930s. The Latin alphabet is not widely used today, although its adoption is advocated by certain groups. Cyrillic The Cyrillic script was introduced in Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic in the late 1930s,