The Azerbaijani alphabet (, , ) has three versions which includes the Perso-Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets. North Azerbaijani, the official language of Republic of Azerbaijan, is written in a modified Latin alphabet. This superseded previous versions based on Cyrillic and Arabic scripts after the fall of Soviet Union. In Iran, where Iranian Azerbaijanis make up the second largest ethnic group after ethnic Persians, a modified Persian script is widely used to write the South Azerbaijani language. Azerbaijanis of Dagestan and other parts of Russia still use the Cyrillic script. Latin Azerbaijani alphabet The Azerbaijani Latin alphabet consists of 32 letters. History From the nineteenth century there were efforts by some intellectuals like Mirza Fatali Akhundov and Mammad agha Shahtakhtinski to replace the Arabic script and create a Latin alphabet for Azeri. In 1929, a Latin alphabet was created by Soviet Union sponsored Yeni türk əlifba komitəsi (New Turkic Alphabet Committee; Јени түрк əлифба комитəси) in Baku which hoped that the new alphabet would divide the Azerbaijanis in the USSR from those living in Iran. An additional reason for the Soviet regime's encouragement of a non-Arabic script was that they hoped the transition would work towards secularizing Azerbaijan's Muslim culture and since language script reform, proposed as early as the 19th century by Azeri intellectuals (e.g. Mirza Fatali Akhundov), had previously been rejected by the Azeri religious establishment on the grounds that Arabic script, the language of the Koran, was "holy and should not be tampered with" there was some historical basis for the reform which received overwhelming support at the First Turcological Congress in Baku during 1926 where the reform was voted for 101 to 7. The Azeri poet Samad Vurgun declared "Azerbaijani people are proud of being the first among Oriental nations that buried the Arabic alphabet and adopted the Latin alphabet. This event is written in golden letters of our history" As a result, in the Soviet Union in 1926 the Uniform Turkic Alphabet was introduced to replace the varieties of the Arabic script in use at the time. In 1939 Joseph Stalin ordered that the Azeri script used in the USSR again be changed, this time to the Cyrillic script in order to sever the Soviet Azerbaijani Turks' ties with the Turkish people in the Republic of Turkey. At the same time that the leaders of the Soviet Union were attempting to isolate the Soviet population