The official language of Turkmenistan is Turkmen, a language belonging to the Southern Turkic (or Oghuz) branch of Turkic languages. Under decree by the Soviet government, the orthodox Arabic script of the Turkmen language was replaced in 1929 by a modified Latin (Roman) script. The Latin script was in turn replaced in 1940 by a modified Cyrillic script (the script of the Russian language). Turkmen was made the official language of the Turkmen SSR in 1990. In the early 1990s the government of an independent Turkmenistan announced that the nation would make a gradual return to the Latin script. Russian is also spoken in Turkmenistan, mainly by the Russian minority; only about 25 % of the Turkmen population are fluent in Russian. Under Turkmenistan’s 1992 constitution, Russian lost its official status as the language of interethnic communication.