The Portuguese language began to be used regularly in documents and poetry around the 12th century. Unlike neighboring Romance languages that adopted formal orthographies by the 18th century, the Portuguese language did not have a uniform spelling standard until the 20th century. The formation of the Portuguese Republic in 1911 was motivation for the establishment of orthographic reform in Portugal and its overseas territories and colonies. Brazil would adopt an orthographic standard based on, but not identical to, the Portuguese standard a few decades later. Further minor spelling reforms were approved in lusophone countries over the rest of the 20th century. In 1990, a further agreement was reached between the various countries, with Portugal, Brazil, and Cape Verde adopting the new standard gradually by the beginning of 2016. Pre-modern Portuguese orthography The Portuguese language began to be used regularly in documents and poetry around the 12th century. In 1290, King Dinis created the first Portuguese university in Lisbon (later moved to Coimbra) and decreed that Portuguese, then called simply the "common language", would henceforth be used instead of Latin, and named the "Portuguese language". In 1296, it was adopted by the royal chancellery and began to be used for writing laws and in notaries. The medieval spelling of Portuguese was not uniform, since it had no official standard, but most authors used an essentially phonemic orthography, with minor concessions to etymology common in other Romance languages, such as the use of c for before e or i, but ç otherwise, or the use of ss for between vowels, but s otherwise. King Diniz, who was an admirer of the poetry of the troubadours and a poet himself, popularized the Occitan digraphs nh and lh for the palatal consonants and , which until then had been spelled with several digraphs, including nn and ll, as in Spanish. These early forms of Old Portuguese spelling in transition have been referred to as Latin–Portuguese or Latin-Romance. During the Renaissance, appreciation for classical culture led many authors to imitate Latin and (Romanized) Ancient Greek, filling words with a profusion of silent letters and other etymological graphemes, such as ch (pronounced as c/qu), ph (pronounced as f), rh, th, y (pronounced as i), cc, pp, tt, mn (pronounced as n), sce, sci (pronounced as ce, ci), bt, pt, mpt (pronounced as t), and so on, still found today in the orthographies of French and English.