Turkmen is an Oghuz Turkic language closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani, spoken by around 7 million people in Turkmenistan and by communities in Afghanistan and Iran. Its literary heritage is most famously represented by the 18th-century poet Magtymguly Pyragy, considered the father of Turkmen literature, whose lyrical verses helped standardise the written language. Like other Soviet-era languages, Turkmen was written first in Arabic script, then briefly in Latin from 1928, then in Cyrillic from 1940. After independence in 1991, Turkmenistan adopted a new Latin alphabet in 1993, which has since been revised several times. The modern Latin script includes some unusual digraphs and special characters to represent Turkmen phonemes accurately. Turkmenistan's relative isolation under its authoritarian governments has limited outside linguistic influence, keeping Turkmen among the more conservative of the modern Oghuz languages.
