12 April 1993 Turkmenistan's President Saparmurat Niyazov declared that Turkmenistan would reform their Cyrillic alphabet to a new Latin based script. On the same day the Mejlis (Assembly of Deputies) passed a resolution in support of Niyazov's decision. The transition, which was scheduled to take place between 1993-1995, would further the aims of the 1990 Language Reform and the Education Reforms planned for October 1993. The newly independent country of Turkmenistan, which had declared its sovereignty on October 27, 1991, in reforming its social and political realms from Soviet to Turkmen added script to the agenda. This was the third time since Turkmenistan came under Russian domination (1880s) that an entirely new Turkmen script was adopted.
Script codification was a defining aspect of post-1917 Turkic identity formation. Political extra-code factors dominated the preferences in developing most of the Turkic writing systems as nationalism and Sovietism politicized similarities and distances between the Turkic dialects. A distinctive Turkmen writing system would have assisted in differentiating the Turkmen from other Turks. Conversely, by sharing the writing system of other Turkic scripts, the Turkmen would have taken a step toward designating themselves culturally and politically as "Turks" rather than as "Turkmen." Neither was ever fully implemented as the political winds shifted from support for development of reformed-Arabic scripts in each Turkic region to a push for Latinization, and later Cyrillicization. The Soviet Turks' brief period of cultural self-determination was ended in the late 1920s. However, successive script and alphabet reforms confirm the enduring import of script symbolism in the Soviet Union. As does the fact that when independence came again in 1991 many of the same issues were picked up by the Turkic Central Asians and the question of how similarities between their writing systems would affect their autonomy was one of them. The intellectual work and nationalism which can be found in the Central Asian republics today are actually drawing on and recapturing an earlier period of self-determination; the 1920s and the period of Arabic script reform when script was a preeminent symbol of self-definition and national identity construction.