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The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic,
Caucasian Caucasian may refer to: Anthropology *Anything from the Caucasus region ** ** ** ''Caucasian Exarchate'' (1917–1920), an ecclesiastical exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Caucasus region * * * Languages * Northwest Caucasian l ...
and
Iranic The Iranian peoples or Iranic peoples are a diverse grouping of Indo-European peoples who are identified by their usage of the Iranian languages and other cultural similarities. The Proto-Iranians are believed to have emerged as a separate ...
-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the
Caucasus The Caucasus () or Caucasia (), is a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, mainly comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (country), Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia. The Caucasus Mountains, including the Greater Caucasus range ...
,
Central Asia Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a subregion, region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes t ...
, North Asia, and
East Asia East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both Geography, geographical and culture, ethno-cultural terms. The modern State (polity), states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. ...
.
, around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages, with
Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
accounting for about half of them. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...
, following the
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
and
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
alphabets. The
Early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living ...
was developed during the 9th century AD at the
Preslav Literary School The Preslav Literary School ( bg, Преславска книжовна школа), also known as the Pliska Literary School or Pliska-Preslav Literary school was the first literary school in the medieval Bulgarian Empire. It was established by ...
in the First Bulgarian Empire during the reign of tsar Simeon I the Great, probably by disciples of the two Byzantine brothers Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, who had previously created the Glagolitic script. The script is named in honor of Saint Cyril.


Etymology

Since the script was conceived and popularised by the followers of Cyril and Methodius, rather than by Cyril and Methodius themselves, its name denotes homage rather than authorship. The name "Cyrillic" often confuses people who are not familiar with the script's history, because it does not identify a country of origin (in contrast to the "Greek alphabet"). Among the general public, it is often called "the Russian alphabet," because Russian is the most popular and influential alphabet based on the script. Some Bulgarian intellectuals, notably Stefan Tsanev, have expressed concern over this, and have suggested that the Cyrillic script be called the "Bulgarian alphabet" instead, for the sake of historical accuracy. In Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Czech and Slovak, the Cyrillic alphabet is also known as ''azbuka'', derived from the old names of the first two letters of most Cyrillic alphabets (just as the term ''alphabet'' came from the first two Greek letters ''alpha'' and ''beta''). In Czech and Slovak, which have never used Cyrillic, "azbuka" refers to Cyrillic and contrasts with "abeceda", which refers to the local Latin script and is composed of the names of the first letters (A, B, C, and D). In Russian, syllabaries, especially the Japanese kana, are commonly referred to as 'syllabic azbukas' rather than 'syllabic scripts'.


History

The Cyrillic script was created in the First Bulgarian Empire.Paul Cubberley (1996) "The Slavic Alphabets". In Daniels and Bright, eds. ''The World's Writing Systems.'' Oxford University Press. . Modern scholars believe that the
Early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living ...
was created at the
Preslav Literary School The Preslav Literary School ( bg, Преславска книжовна школа), also known as the Pliska Literary School or Pliska-Preslav Literary school was the first literary school in the medieval Bulgarian Empire. It was established by ...
, the most important early literary and cultural center of the First Bulgarian Empire and of all Slavs:
Unlike the Churchmen in Ohrid, Preslav scholars were much more dependent upon Greek models and quickly abandoned the Glagolitic scripts in favor of an adaptation of the Greek uncial to the needs of Slavic, which is now known as the Cyrillic alphabet.
A number of prominent Bulgarian writers and scholars worked at the school, including Naum of Preslav until 893; Constantine of Preslav; Joan Ekzarh (also transcr. John the Exarch); and
Chernorizets Hrabar Chernorizets Hrabar ( chu, Чрьнори́зьць Хра́бръ, ''Črĭnorizĭcĭ Hrabrŭ'', bg, Черноризец Храбър)Sometimes modernized as ''Chernorizetz Hrabar'', ''Chernorizets Hrabr'' or ''Crnorizec Hrabar'' was a Bulgarian ...
, among others. The school was also a center of translation, mostly of Byzantine authors. The Cyrillic script is derived from the Greek uncial script letters, augmented by
ligature Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...
s and consonants from the older
Glagolitic alphabet The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...
for sounds not found in Greek. Glagolitic and Cyrillic were formalized by the Byzantine
Saints Cyril and Methodius Cyril (born Constantine, 826–869) and Methodius (815–885) were two brothers and Byzantine Christian theologians and missionaries. For their work evangelizing the Slavs, they are known as the "Apostles to the Slavs". They are credited wi ...
and their disciples, such as Saints Naum, Clement, Angelar, and Sava. They spread and taught Christianity in the whole of Bulgaria.''Columbia Encyclopedia'', Sixth Edition. 2001–05, s.v. "Cyril and Methodius, Saints"; ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', Encyclopædia Britannica Incorporated, Warren E. Preece – 1972, p. 846, s.v., "Cyril and Methodius, Saints" and "Eastern Orthodoxy, Missions ancient and modern"; ''Encyclopedia of World Cultures'', David H. Levinson, 1991, p. 239, s.v., "Social Science"; Eric M. Meyers, ''The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East'', p. 151, 1997; Lunt, ''Slavic Review'', June, 1964, p. 216; Roman Jakobson, ''Crucial problems of Cyrillo-Methodian Studies''; Leonid Ivan Strakhovsky, ''A Handbook of Slavic Studies'', p. 98; V. Bogdanovich, ''History of the ancient Serbian literature'', Belgrade, 1980, p. 119The Columbia Encyclopaedia, Sixth Edition. 2001–05, O.Ed. Saints Cyril and Methodius "Cyril and Methodius, Saints) 869 and 884, respectively, "Greek missionaries, brothers, called Apostles to the Slavs and fathers of Slavonic literature."Encyclopædia Britannica, ''Major alphabets of the world, Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets'', 2008, O.Ed. "The two early Slavic alphabets, the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic, were invented by St. Cyril, or Constantine (c. 827–869), and St. Methodii (c. 825–884). These men from Thessaloniki who became apostles to the southern Slavs, whom they converted to Christianity." Paul Cubberley posits that although Cyril may have codified and expanded Glagolitic, it was his students in the First Bulgarian Empire under Tsar
Simeon the Great Tsar Simeon (also Symeon) I the Great ( cu, цѣсар҄ь Сѷмеѡ́нъ А҃ Вели́къ, cěsarĭ Sỳmeonŭ prĭvŭ Velikŭ bg, цар Симеон I Велики, Simeon I Veliki el, Συμεών Αʹ ὁ Μέγας, Sumeṓn prôto ...
that developed Cyrillic from the Greek letters in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books. Cyrillic spread among other Slavic peoples, as well as among non-Slavic Vlachs. The earliest datable Cyrillic inscriptions have been found in the area of Preslav, in the medieval city itself and at nearby Patleina Monastery, both in present-day Shumen Province, as well as in the Ravna Monastery and in the
Varna Monastery Varna Monastery is a large preserved early medieval monastery complex, opened near Varna, Bulgaria, with the status of a cultural monument of national importance for Bulgaria since 2015.Проф. д.и.н. Казимир Попконстант� ...
. The new script became the basis of alphabets used in various languages in Orthodox Church-dominated Eastern Europe, both Slavic and non-Slavic languages (such as Romanian, until the 1860s). For centuries, Cyrillic was also used by Catholic and Muslim Slavs (see
Bosnian Cyrillic Bosnian Cyrillic, widely known as Bosančica is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet that originated in medieval Bosnia. The term was coined at the end of the 19th century by Ćiro Truhelka. It was widely used in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovin ...
). Cyrillic and
Glagolitic The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...
were used for the Church Slavonic language, especially the Old Church Slavonic variant. Hence expressions such as "И is the tenth Cyrillic letter" typically refer to the order of the Church Slavonic alphabet; not every Cyrillic alphabet uses every letter available in the script. The Cyrillic script came to dominate Glagolitic in the 12th century. The literature produced in Old Church Slavonic soon spread north from Bulgaria and became the lingua franca of the Balkans and Eastern Europe."On the relationship of old Church Slavonic to the written language of early Rus'" Horace G. Lunt; Russian Linguistics, Volume 11, Numbers 2–3 / January, 1987Benjamin W. Fortson. ''Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction'', p. 374 Bosnian Cyrillic, widely known as ''Bosančica'' is an extinct variant of the
Cyrillic alphabet , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = Gr ...
that originated in medieval Bosnia. Paleographers consider the earliest features of Bosnian Cyrillic script had likely begun to appear between the 10th or 11th century, with the Humac tablet (a tablet written in Bosnian Cyrillic) to be the first such document using this type of script and is believed to date from this period. Bosnian Cyrillic was used continuously until the 18th century, with sporadic usage even taking place in the 20th century. With the orthographic reform of Saint
Evtimiy of Tarnovo Saint Euthymius of Tarnovo (also ''Evtimiy''; , ''Sveti Evtimiy Tarnovski'') was Patriarch of Bulgaria between 1375 and 1393. Regarded as one of the most important figures of medieval Bulgaria, Euthymius was the last head of the Bulgarian Orth ...
and other prominent representatives of the Tarnovo Literary School of the 14th and 15th centuries, such as Gregory Tsamblak and Constantine of Kostenets, the school influenced Russian, Serbian, Wallachian and Moldavian medieval culture. This is known in Russia as the second South-Slavic influence. In the early 18th century, the Cyrillic script used in Russia was heavily reformed by Peter the Great, who had recently returned from his Grand Embassy in Western Europe. The new letterforms, called the Civil script, became closer to those of the Latin alphabet; several archaic letters were abolished and several new letters were introduced designed by Peter himself. Letters became distinguished between upper and lower case. West European typography culture was also adopted. The pre-reform letterforms, called 'Полуустав', were notably retained in Church Slavonic and are sometimes used in Russian even today, especially if one wants to give a text a 'Slavic' or 'archaic' feel. The alphabet used for the modern Church Slavonic language in
Eastern Orthodox Eastern Orthodoxy, also known as Eastern Orthodox Christianity, is one of the three main branches of Chalcedonian Christianity, alongside Catholicism and Protestantism. Like the Pentarchy of the first millennium, the mainstream (or " canonical ...
and
Eastern Catholic The Eastern Catholic Churches or Oriental Catholic Churches, also called the Eastern-Rite Catholic Churches, Eastern Rite Catholicism, or simply the Eastern Churches, are 23 Eastern Christian autonomous (''sui iuris'') particular churches of ...
rites still resembles early Cyrillic. However, over the course of the following millennium, Cyrillic adapted to changes in spoken language, developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages, and was subjected to academic reform and political decrees. A notable example of such linguistic reform can be attributed to Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, who updated the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by removing certain graphemes no longer represented in the vernacular and introducing graphemes specific to Serbian (i.e. Љ Њ Ђ Ћ Џ Ј), distancing it from Church Slavonic alphabet in use prior to the reform. Today, many languages in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and
northern Eurasia Eurasia (, ) is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. Primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, it spans from the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Japanese archipelago an ...
are written in Cyrillic alphabets.


Letters

Cyrillic script spread throughout the East Slavic and some South Slavic territories, being adopted for writing local languages, such as Old East Slavic. Its adaptation to local languages produced a number of Cyrillic alphabets, discussed below. Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts. Yeri () was originally a
ligature Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...
of Yer and I ( + = ). Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter І: (not an ancestor of modern Ya, Я, which is derived from ), , (ligature of and ), , . Sometimes different letters were used interchangeably, for example = = , as were typographical variants like = . There were also commonly used ligatures like = . The letters also had numeric values, based not on Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek ancestors. The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers. Many of the letterforms differed from those of modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include glyphs sufficient to reproduce the alphabet. In accordance with
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
policy, the standard does not include letterform variations or ligatures found in manuscript sources unless they can be shown to conform to the Unicode definition of a character. The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language. In Microsoft Windows, the Segoe UI user interface font is notable for having complete support for the archaic Cyrillic letters since Windows 8.


Currency signs

Some currency signs have derived from Cyrillic letters: * The Ukrainian
hryvnia sign The hryvnia sign (₴) is a currency symbol, used for the Ukrainian hryvnia currency since 2004. Description The hryvnia sign is a cursive minuscule Ukrainian Cyrillic letter He (''г''), or a mirrored letter S, with a double horizontal strok ...
(₴) is from the cursive
minuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
Ukrainian Cyrillic letter He (''г''). * The Russian
ruble sign The ruble sign, , is the currency sign used for the Russian ruble, the official currency of Russia. Its form is a Cyrillic letter Р with an additional horizontal stroke. The design was approved on 11 December 2013 after a public poll that took ...
(₽) from the majuscule Р. * The
Kyrgyzstani som The som (Kyrgyz: сом; ISO code: KGS; sign: с) is the currency of Kyrgyzstan. Etymology The official name of the Soviet currency in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, and Uzbek was ''soum'', and this name appeared written on the back of banknotes ...
sign (с) from the majuscule С (es) * The Kazakhstani tenge sign (₸) from Т * The
Mongolian tögrög The tögrög or tugrik (Mongolian Cyrillic: , Mongolian script: , transcription: ; sign: ₮; code: MNT) is the official currency of Mongolia. It was historically subdivided into 100 ( / ). Currently, the lowest denomination in regular use is th ...
sign (₮) from Т


Letterforms and typography

The development of Cyrillic
typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), ...
passed directly from the medieval stage to the late Baroque, without a
Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
phase as in Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters (categorized as vyaz' and still found on many icon inscriptions today) show a marked tendency to be very tall and narrow, with strokes often shared between adjacent letters. Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms ( ru) in the early 18th century. Over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the script. Thus, unlike the majority of modern Greek fonts that retained their own set of design principles for lower-case letters (such as the placement of serifs, the shapes of stroke ends, and stroke-thickness rules, although Greek capital letters do use Latin design principles), modern Cyrillic fonts are much the same as modern Latin fonts of the same font family. The development of some Cyrillic computer typefaces from Latin ones has also contributed to the visual Latinization of Cyrillic type.


Lowercase forms

Cyrillic
uppercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
and
lowercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
letter forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic lowercase letters are essentially
small capitals In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is technicall ...
(with exceptions: Cyrillic , , , , , and adopted Western lowercase shapes, lowercase is typically designed under the influence of Latin , lowercase , and are traditional handwritten forms, although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-caps glyphs. Cyrillic fonts, as well as Latin ones, have roman and italic types (practically all popular modern fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are shared by both). However, the native font terminology in most Slavic languages (for example, in Russian) does not use the words "roman" and "italic" in this sense. Instead, the nomenclature follows German naming patterns: * Roman type is called ' ("upright type")compare with ' ("regular type") in German * Italic type is called ' ("cursive") or ' ("cursive type")from the German word ', meaning italic typefaces and not cursive writing * Cursive handwriting is ' ("handwritten type")in German: ' or ', both meaning literally 'running type' * A (mechanically) sloped oblique type of sans-serif faces is ' ("sloped" or "slanted type"). * A boldfaced type is called ' ("semi-bold type"), because there existed fully boldfaced shapes that have been out of use since the beginning of the 20th century.


Italic and cursive forms

Similarly to Latin fonts, italic and cursive types of many Cyrillic letters (typically lowercase; uppercase only for handwritten or stylish types) are very different from their upright roman types. In certain cases, the correspondence between uppercase and lowercase glyphs does not coincide in Latin and Cyrillic fonts: for example, italic Cyrillic is the lowercase counterpart of not of . Note: in some fonts or styles, , i.e. the lowercase italic Cyrillic , may look like Latin , and , i.e. lowercase italic Cyrillic , may look like small-capital italic . In Standard Serbian, as well as in Macedonian, some italic and cursive letters are allowed to be different to more closely resemble the handwritten letters. The regular (upright) shapes are generally standardized in small caps form. Notes: Depending on fonts available, the Serbian row may appear identical to the Russian row.
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
approximations are used in the '' faux'' row to ensure it can be rendered properly across all systems. In Bulgarian typography, many lowercase letterforms may more closely resemble the cursive forms on the one hand and Latin glyphs on the other hand, e.g. by having an ascender or descender or by using rounded arcs instead of sharp corners. Sometimes, uppercase letters may have a different shape as well, e.g. more triangular, Д and Л, like Greek delta Δ and lambda Λ. Notes: Depending on fonts available, the Bulgarian row may appear identical to the Russian row.
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
approximations are used in the '' faux'' row to ensure it can be rendered properly across all systems; in some cases, such as ж with ''k''-like ascender, no such approximation exists.


Accessing variant forms

Computer fonts typically default to the Central/Eastern, Russian letterforms, and require the use of OpenType Layout (OTL) features to display the Western, Bulgarian or Southern, Serbian/Macedonian forms. Depending on the choices of the font manufacturer, they may either be automatically activated by the ''local variant'' locl feature for text tagged with an appropriate
language code A language code is a code that assigns letters or numbers as identifiers or classifiers for languages. These codes may be used to organize library collections or presentations of data, to choose the correct localizations and translations in comput ...
, or the author needs to opt-in by activating a ''stylistic set'' ss## or ''character variant'' cv## feature. These solutions only enjoy partial support and may render with default glyphs in certain software configurations.


Cyrillic alphabets

Among others, Cyrillic is the standard script for writing the following languages: *Slavic languages: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian,
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
, Rusyn, Serbo-Croatian ( Standard Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin), Ukrainian *Non-Slavic languages of Russia: Abaza, Adyghe, Avar, Azerbaijani (in Dagestan), Bashkir, Buryat, Chechen, Chuvash, Erzya, Ingush, Kabardian, Kalmyk, Karachay-Balkar,
Kildin Sami Kildin may refer to: * Kildin Island * Kildin class destroyer * Kildin Sami * Ostrov (air base) Ostrov (Russian: ''Веретье'' ("Veret"); also Ostrov-5, Gorokhovka) is a Russian Air Force air base
, Komi, Mari, Moksha, Nogai, Ossetian (in North Ossetia–Alania), Romani, Sakha/Yakut, Tatar, Tuvan, Udmurt, Yuit (Yupik) *Non-Slavic languages in other countries: Abkhaz,
Aleut The Aleuts ( ; russian: Алеуты, Aleuty) are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, which are located between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. Both the Aleut people and the islands are politically divided between the ...
(now mostly in church texts), Dungan, Kazakh (to be replaced by Latin script by 2025), Kyrgyz, Mongolian (to also be written with traditional Mongolian script by 2025), Tajik,
Tlingit The Tlingit ( or ; also spelled Tlinkit) are indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. Their language is the Tlingit language (natively , pronounced ),
(now only in church texts), Turkmen (officially replaced by Latin script), Uzbek (also officially replaced by Latin script, but still in wide use),
Yupik Yupik may refer to: * Yupik peoples, a group of indigenous peoples of Alaska and the Russian Far East * Yupik languages, a group of Eskimo-Aleut languages Yupꞌik (with the apostrophe) may refer to: * Yup'ik people The Yup'ik or Yupiaq (sg ...
(in Alaska) The Cyrillic script has also been used for languages of Alaska, Slavic Europe (except for
Western Slavic The West Slavic languages are a subdivision of the Slavic languages, Slavic language group. They include Polish language, Polish, Czech language, Czech, Slovak language, Slovak, Kashubian language, Kashubian, Upper Sorbian language, Upper Sorbia ...
and some
Southern Slavic Southern may refer to: Businesses * China Southern Airlines, airline based in Guangzhou, China * Southern Airways, defunct US airline * Southern Air, air cargo transportation company based in Norwalk, Connecticut, US * Southern Airways Express, ...
), the
Caucasus The Caucasus () or Caucasia (), is a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, mainly comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (country), Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia. The Caucasus Mountains, including the Greater Caucasus range ...
, the languages of Idel-Ural, Siberia, and the Russian Far East. The first alphabet derived from Cyrillic was Abur, used for the
Komi language The Komi language ( kv, коми кыв, ''komi kyv''), also known as Zyryan, Zyrian or Komi-Zyryan (Komi: коми-зырян кыв, komi-zyrjan kyv),Molodtsov alphabet for the Komi language and various alphabets for
Caucasian languages The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Linguistic comparison allows t ...
.


Usage of Cyrillic versus other scripts


Latin script

A number of languages written in a Cyrillic alphabet have also been written in a Latin alphabet, such as Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Serbian and Romanian (in the Republic of Moldova until 1989, in the Danubian Principalities throughout the 19th century). After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, some of the former republics officially shifted from Cyrillic to Latin. The transition is complete in most of Moldova (except the breakaway region of Transnistria, where Moldovan Cyrillic is official), Turkmenistan, and
Azerbaijan Azerbaijan (, ; az, Azərbaycan ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, , also sometimes officially called the Azerbaijan Republic is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a part of t ...
.
Uzbekistan Uzbekistan (, ; uz, Ozbekiston, italic=yes / , ; russian: Узбекистан), officially the Republic of Uzbekistan ( uz, Ozbekiston Respublikasi, italic=yes / ; russian: Республика Узбекистан), is a doubly landlocked co ...
still uses both systems, and Kazakhstan has officially begun a transition from Cyrillic to Latin (scheduled to be complete by 2025). The
Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
n government has mandated that Cyrillic must be used for all public communications in all federal subjects of Russia, to promote closer ties across the federation. This act was controversial for speakers of many Slavic languages; for others, such as Chechen and Ingush speakers, the law had political ramifications. For example, the separatist Chechen government mandated a Latin script which is still used by many Chechens. Standard Serbian uses both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Cyrillic is nominally the official script of Serbia's administration according to the Serbian constitution; however, the law does not regulate scripts in standard language, or standard language itself by any means. In practice the scripts are equal, with Latin being used more often in a less official capacity. The Zhuang alphabet, used between the 1950s and 1980s in portions of the People's Republic of China, used a mixture of Latin, phonetic, numeral-based, and Cyrillic letters. The non-Latin letters, including Cyrillic, were removed from the alphabet in 1982 and replaced with Latin letters that closely resembled the letters they replaced.


Romanization

There are various systems for Romanization of Cyrillic text, including transliteration to convey Cyrillic spelling in
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
letters, and transcription to convey
pronunciation Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct pronunciation") or simply the way a particular ...
. Standard Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems include: * Scientific transliteration, used in linguistics, is based on the Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet. *The Working Group on Romanization Systems of the
United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoniz ...
recommends different systems for specific languages. These are the most commonly used around the world. * ISO 9:1995, from the International Organization for Standardization. *American Library Association and Library of Congress Romanization tables for Slavic alphabets (
ALA-LC Romanization ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...
), used in North American libraries. *
BGN/PCGN Romanization BGN/PCGN romanization are the systems for romanization and Roman-script spelling conventions adopted by the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (PCGN). The system ...
(1947), United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use). * GOST 16876, a now defunct Soviet transliteration standard. Replaced by GOST 7.79, which is ISO 9 equivalent. *Various informal romanizations of Cyrillic, which adapt the Cyrillic script to Latin and sometimes Greek glyphs for compatibility with small character sets. See also Romanization of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kyrgyz,
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
, Macedonian and Ukrainian.


Cyrillization

Representing other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called Cyrillization.


Summary table


Computer encoding


Unicode

As of Unicode version 15.0, Cyrillic letters, including national and historical alphabets, are encoded across several blocks: * Cyrillic
U+0400–U+04FF
* Cyrillic Supplement
U+0500–U+052F
* Cyrillic Extended-A
U+2DE0–U+2DFF
* Cyrillic Extended-B
U+A640–U+A69F
* Cyrillic Extended-C
U+1C80–U+1C8F
* Cyrillic Extended-D
U+1E030–U+1E08F
*
Phonetic Extensions Phonetic Extensions is a Unicode block containing phonetic characters used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Old Irish phonetic notation, the Oxford English dictionary and American dictionaries, and Americanist and Russianist phonetic notations. ...

U+1D2B, U+1D78
* Combining Half Marks
U+FE2E–U+FE2F
The characters in the range U+0400 to U+045F are essentially the characters from ISO 8859-5 moved upward by 864 positions. The characters in the range U+0460 to U+0489 are historic letters, not used now. The characters in the range U+048A to U+052F are additional letters for various languages that are written with Cyrillic script. Unicode as a general rule does not include accented Cyrillic letters. A few exceptions include: *combinations that are considered as separate letters of respective alphabets, like Й, Ў, Ё, Ї, Ѓ, Ќ (as well as many letters of non-Slavic alphabets); *two most frequent combinations orthographically required to distinguish homonyms in Bulgarian and Macedonian: Ѐ, Ѝ; *a few Old and New Church Slavonic combinations: Ѷ, Ѿ, Ѽ. To indicate stressed or long vowels,
combining diacritical mark In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents). Unicode al ...
s can be used after the respective letter (for example, : е́ у́ э́ etc.). Some languages, including Church Slavonic, are still not fully supported. Unicode 5.1, released on 4 April 2008, introduces major changes to the Cyrillic blocks. Revisions to the existing Cyrillic blocks, and the addition of Cyrillic Extended A (2DE0 ... 2DFF) and Cyrillic Extended B (A640 ... A69F), significantly improve support for the
early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living ...
, Abkhaz,
Aleut The Aleuts ( ; russian: Алеуты, Aleuty) are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, which are located between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. Both the Aleut people and the islands are politically divided between the ...
, Chuvash,
Kurdish Kurdish may refer to: *Kurds or Kurdish people *Kurdish languages *Kurdish alphabets *Kurdistan, the land of the Kurdish people which includes: **Southern Kurdistan **Eastern Kurdistan **Northern Kurdistan **Western Kurdistan See also * Kurd (dis ...
, and Moksha.


Other

Punctuation for Cyrillic text is similar to that used in European Latin-alphabet languages. Other character encoding systems for Cyrillic: * CP8668-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in MS-DOS also known as GOST-alternative. Cyrillic characters go in their native order, with a "window" for pseudographic characters. *
ISO/IEC 8859-5 ISO/IEC 8859-5:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 5: Latin/Cyrillic alphabet'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 198 ...
8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by
International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ) is an international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Art ...
* KOI8-R8-bit native Russian character encoding. Invented in the USSR for use on Soviet clones of American IBM and DEC computers. The Cyrillic characters go in the order of their Latin counterparts, which allowed the text to remain readable after transmission via a 7-bit line that removed the
most significant bit In computing, bit numbering is the convention used to identify the bit positions in a binary number. Bit significance and indexing In computing, the least significant bit (LSB) is the bit position in a binary integer representing the binar ...
from each bytethe result became a very rough, but readable, Latin transliteration of Cyrillic. Standard encoding of early 1990s for Unix systems and the first Russian Internet encoding. * KOI8-UKOI8-R with addition of Ukrainian letters. * MIK8-bit native Bulgarian character encoding for use in Microsoft
DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
. * Windows-12518-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in Microsoft Windows. The simplest 8-bit Cyrillic encoding32 capital chars in native order at 0xc0–0xdf, 32 usual chars at 0xe0–0xff, with rarely used "YO" characters somewhere else. No pseudographics. Former standard encoding in some
Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...
distributions for Belarusian and Bulgarian, but currently displaced by UTF-8. *GOST-main. *
GB 2312 is a key official character set of the People's Republic of China, used for Simplified Chinese characters. GB2312 is the registered internet name for EUC-CN, which is its usual encoded form. ''GB'' refers to the Guobiao standards (国家标准 ...
Principally simplified Chinese encodings, but there are also the basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case). * JIS and
Shift JIS Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjuncti ...
Principally Japanese encodings, but there are also the basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case).


Keyboard layouts

Each language has its own standard
keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. is the actua ...
, adopted from typewriters. With the flexibility of computer input methods, there are also transliterating or phonetic/homophonic keyboard layouts made for typists who are more familiar with other layouts, like the common English QWERTY keyboard. When practical Cyrillic keyboard layouts or fonts are unavailable, computer users sometimes use transliteration or look-alike "volapuk" encoding to type in languages that are normally written with the Cyrillic alphabet.


See also

* Cyrillic Alphabet Day * Cyrillic digraphs * Cyrillic script in Unicode * Faux Cyrillic, real or fake Cyrillic letters used to give Latin-alphabet text a Soviet or Russian feel * List of Cyrillic digraphs and trigraphs *
Russian Braille Russian Braille is the braille alphabet of the Russian language. With suitable extensions, it is used for languages of neighboring countries that are written in Cyrillic in print, such as Ukrainian and Mongolian. It is based on the Latin trans ...
* Russian cursive * Russian manual alphabet * Vladislav the Grammarian *
Yugoslav Braille Yugoslav Braille is a family of closely related braille alphabets used for South Slavic languages of former Yugoslavia, namely Serbo-Croatian, Slovene and Macedonian. It is based on the unified international braille conventions, with the letters ...
* Yugoslav manual alphabet


Internet top-level domains in Cyrillic

* gTLDs *
.мон .мон is the internationalised (Cyrillic) internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Mongolia. It is administered by .MN Registry, Datacom. The domain name is composed of the consonants in the three first letters of the country name. T ...
*
.бг (abbreviation of bg, България, translit=Balgarija) is an internationalized country code top-level domain (IDN ccTLD) for Bulgaria..қаз *
.рф The domain name .рф (romanized as ''.rf''; abbreviation of ) is the Cyrillic country code top-level domain for the Russian Federation, in the Domain Name System of the Internet. In the Domain Name System it has the ASCII DNS name . The domain ...
*
.срб (romanized as ''.srb''; abbreviation of sr, Србија/) is the Internationalised (Cyrillic) Internet country code top-level domain ( IDN ccTLD) for Serbia. It has been active since May 3, 2011. The Serbian National Internet Domain Registry ...
*
.укр The domain name .укр ( romanized as ''.ukr''; abbreviation of uk, Україна, tr. ''Ukrayina'') is an approved internationalized country code top-level domain (IDN ccTLD) for Ukraine. It is a common abbreviation used in Ukraine, as in '' ...
*
.мкд .мкд (Punycode .xn--d1alf, '' latinized:'' .mkd) is the internationalized Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for North Macedonia. It is administered by The Macedonian Academic Research Network (MARnet). In November 2012, MARnet ...
*
.бел .бел (abbreviation of be, Беларусь, translit=Belarus) is an approved internationalized country code top-level domain (IDN ccTLD) for Belarus. Activation of the domain was finished in late 2014. The Latin script domain for Belarus is ...


Notes


References

* Bringhurst, Robert (2002). '' The Elements of Typographic Style'' (version 2.5), pp. 262–264. Vancouver, Hartley & Marks. . * *Ivan G. Iliev. Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet. Plovdiv. 2012
Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet
* *Nezirović, M. (1992). ''Jevrejsko-španjolska književnost''. Sarajevo: Svjetlost. ited in Šmid, 2002*Prostov, Eugene Victor. 1931. "Origins of Russian Printing". ''Library Quarterly'' 1 (January): 255–77. *Šmid, Katja (2002). " ", in ''Verba Hispanica'', vol X. Liubliana: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Liubliana. . *'The Lives of St. Tsurho and St. Strahota', Bohemia, 1495, Vatican Library *Philipp Ammon
''Tractatus slavonicus''.
in: ''Sjani (Thoughts) Georgian Scientific Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature'', N 17, 2016, pp. 248–256


External links



overview and history of Cyrillic charsets.
Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts
a collection of writing systems and transliteration tables
Cyrillic Alphabets of Slavic Languages
review of Cyrillic charsets in Slavic Languages.
Cyrillic and its Long Journey East – NamepediA Blog
article about the Cyrillic script *
Unicode collation charts
��including Cyrillic letters, sorted by shape {{DEFAULTSORT:Cyrillic alphabet Bulgarian inventions Eastern Europe North Asia Central Asia