 Around 1880, while in Moscow and approximately simultaneously with working on Esperanto, Zamenhof made an aborted attempt to standardize Yiddish, based on his native Bialystok (Northeastern) dialect, as a unifying language for the Jews of the Russian Empire.He even used a Latin alphabet, with the letters "ć, h́, ś, ź" (the same as in early drafts of Esperanto, later "ĉ, ĥ, ŝ, ĵ") and "ě" for schwa.However, he concluded there was no future for such a project, and abandoned it, dedicating himself to Esperanto as a unifying language for all humankind.