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The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, Caucasian languages, Caucasian and Iranian languages, Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, and used by many other minority languages.
, around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages, with Russia 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 Languages of the European Union#Writing systems, European Union, following the Latin script, Latin and Greek alphabet, Greek alphabets.
The Early Cyrillic alphabet was developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire during the reign of Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria, Simeon I the Great, probably by the disciples of the two Byzantine brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius, Cyril and Methodius, who had previously created the Glagolitic script. Among them were Clement of Ohrid, Naum of Preslav, Constantine of Preslav, John the Exarch, Joan Ekzarh, Chernorizets Hrabar, Saint Angelar, Angelar, Saint Sava (disciple of Saints Cyril and Methodius), Sava and other scholars. The script is named in honor of Cyril the Philosopher, Saint Cyril.
The Cyrillic script was created during 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 was created at the Preslav Literary School, the most important early literary and cultural center of the First Bulgarian Empire and of all Slavs:
A number of prominent Bulgarian writers and scholars worked at the school, including Naum of Preslav until 893; Constantine of Preslav; John the Exarch, Joan Ekzarh (also transcr. John the Exarch); and Chernorizets Hrabar, among others. The school was also a center of translation, mostly of Byzantine Empire, Byzantine authors. The Cyrillic script is derived from the Greek alphabet, Greek uncial script letters, augmented by Typographic ligature, ligatures and consonants from the older Glagolitic alphabet for sounds not found in Greek. Glagolitic and Cyrillic were formalized by the Byzantine Saints Cyril and Methodius and their Bulgarian disciples, such as Saints Saint Naum, Naum, Clement of Ohrid, Clement, Saint Angelar, Angelar, and Saint Sava (disciple of Saints Cyril and Methodius), 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. 119.The 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 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 Romanians. 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. The new script became the basis of alphabets used in various languages in Eastern Orthodox Church, Orthodox Church-dominated Eastern Europe, both Slavic and non-Slavic languages (such as Romanian language, Romanian, until the 1860s). For centuries, Cyrillic was also used by Catholic and Muslim Slavs.
Cyrillic and Glagolitic 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.Benjamin W. Fortson. ''Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction'', p. 374.
Cyrillic in modern-day Bosnia is an extinct and disputed variant of the Cyrillic alphabets, Cyrillic alphabet that originated in medieval Bosnia, medieval period. Paleographers consider the earliest features of script had likely begun to appear between the 10th or 11th century, with the Humac tablet to be the first such document using this type of script and is believed to date from this period. It was used continuously until the 18th century, with sporadic usage extending into the 20th century.
With the orthographic reform of Saint Patriarch Evtimiy of Bulgaria, Evtimiy of Tarnovo 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 Slavs, South-Slavic influence.
In 170810, the Cyrillic script used in Russia was heavily reformed by Peter the Great, who had recently returned from his Grand Embassy of Peter the Great, 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 ''poluustav'' (), 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 and Eastern Catholic 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 Karadžić, 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 the Church Slavonic alphabet in use prior to the reform. Today, Languages using Cyrillic, many languages in the Languages of the Balkans, Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Eurasiatic languages, northern Eurasia are written in Cyrillic alphabets.
Yeri () was originally a ligature (typography), ligature 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 = .
Cyrillic capital letters, uppercase and lower case, lowercase letter forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic lowercase letters are essentially small caps, small capitals (with exceptions: Cyrillic , , , , , and adopted Latin lowercase shapes, lowercase is typically based on from Latin typefaces, lowercase , and are traditional handwritten forms), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-caps glyphs.
Cyrillic typefaces, as well as Latin ones, have roman type, roman and italic type, italic forms (practically all popular modern computer fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are shared by both). However, the native typeface 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.
Standard Serbian language, Serbian uses Serbian language#Writing system, 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.
*''Ё'' in Russian is usually spelled as ''Е''; ''Ё'' is typically printed in texts for learners and in dictionaries, and in word pairs which are differentiated only by that letter (''все'' – ''всё'').
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
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 marks can be used after the respective letter (for example, : е́ у́ э́ etc.). Some languages, including Church Slavonic language, 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, Abkhaz language, Abkhaz, Aleut language, Aleut, Chuvash language, Chuvash, Kurdish language, Kurdish, and Moksha language, Moksha.
The Cyrillic Charset Soup
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.
(archived 22 February 2014)
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 Cyrillic script, Bulgarian inventions Eastern Europe Central Asia
Etymology
Since the script was conceived and popularised by the followers of Cyril and Methodius in Bulgaria, rather than by Cyril and Methodius themselves, its name denotes homage rather than authorship.History
The Cyrillic script was created during 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 was created at the Preslav Literary School, the most important early literary and cultural center of the First Bulgarian Empire and of all Slavs:
A number of prominent Bulgarian writers and scholars worked at the school, including Naum of Preslav until 893; Constantine of Preslav; John the Exarch, Joan Ekzarh (also transcr. John the Exarch); and Chernorizets Hrabar, among others. The school was also a center of translation, mostly of Byzantine Empire, Byzantine authors. The Cyrillic script is derived from the Greek alphabet, Greek uncial script letters, augmented by Typographic ligature, ligatures and consonants from the older Glagolitic alphabet for sounds not found in Greek. Glagolitic and Cyrillic were formalized by the Byzantine Saints Cyril and Methodius and their Bulgarian disciples, such as Saints Saint Naum, Naum, Clement of Ohrid, Clement, Saint Angelar, Angelar, and Saint Sava (disciple of Saints Cyril and Methodius), 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. 119.The 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 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 Romanians. 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. The new script became the basis of alphabets used in various languages in Eastern Orthodox Church, Orthodox Church-dominated Eastern Europe, both Slavic and non-Slavic languages (such as Romanian language, Romanian, until the 1860s). For centuries, Cyrillic was also used by Catholic and Muslim Slavs.
Cyrillic and Glagolitic 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.Benjamin W. Fortson. ''Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction'', p. 374.
Cyrillic in modern-day Bosnia is an extinct and disputed variant of the Cyrillic alphabets, Cyrillic alphabet that originated in medieval Bosnia, medieval period. Paleographers consider the earliest features of script had likely begun to appear between the 10th or 11th century, with the Humac tablet to be the first such document using this type of script and is believed to date from this period. It was used continuously until the 18th century, with sporadic usage extending into the 20th century.
With the orthographic reform of Saint Patriarch Evtimiy of Bulgaria, Evtimiy of Tarnovo 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 Slavs, South-Slavic influence.
In 170810, the Cyrillic script used in Russia was heavily reformed by Peter the Great, who had recently returned from his Grand Embassy of Peter the Great, 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 ''poluustav'' (), 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 and Eastern Catholic 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 Karadžić, 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 the Church Slavonic alphabet in use prior to the reform. Today, Languages using Cyrillic, many languages in the Languages of the Balkans, Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Eurasiatic languages, northern Eurasia 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.Majuscule and minuscule
Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.
Yeri () was originally a ligature (typography), ligature 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 = .
Numbers
The letters also had numeric values, based not on Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek numerals, Greek ancestors.Computer support
Computer fonts for early Cyrillic alphabets are not routinely provided. Many of the letterforms differ from those of modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal between manuscripts, and changed over time. In accordance with Unicode policy, the standard does not include letterform variations or Ligature (typography), ligatures found in manuscript sources unless they can be shown to conform to the Unicode definition of a character: this aspect is the responsibility of the typeface designer. The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improved 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 (₴) is from the cursive minuscule Ukrainian alphabet, Ukrainian Cyrillic letter Ge (Cyrillic), He (''г''). * The Russian ruble sign (₽) from the majuscule Р. * The Kyrgyzstani som sign (⃀) from the majuscule С (es) * The Kazakhstani tenge sign (₸) from Т * The Mongolian tögrög sign (₮) from ТLetterforms and type design
The development of Cyrillic letter forms passed directly from the medieval stage to the late Baroque, without a Renaissance phase as in Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters (categorized as vyaz (Cyrillic calligraphy), 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 Civil script, westernized letter forms (:ru:Гражданский шрифт, 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 typefaces 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 typeface, types are much the same as modern Latin types of the same typeface family. The development of some Cyrillic computer fonts from Latin ones has also contributed to a visual Latinization of Cyrillic type.Lowercase forms
Cyrillic capital letters, uppercase and lower case, lowercase letter forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic lowercase letters are essentially small caps, small capitals (with exceptions: Cyrillic , , , , , and adopted Latin lowercase shapes, lowercase is typically based on from Latin typefaces, lowercase , and are traditional handwritten forms), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-caps glyphs.
Cyrillic typefaces, as well as Latin ones, have roman type, roman and italic type, italic forms (practically all popular modern computer fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are shared by both). However, the native typeface 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 typefaces, italic and cursive forms 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 types: for example, italic Cyrillic is the lowercase counterpart of not of . Note: in some typefaces 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 approximations are used in the ''Faux Cyrillic, faux'' row to ensure it can be rendered properly across all systems. In the Bulgarian alphabet, 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 approximations are used in the ''Faux Cyrillic, 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 list of typographic features, Layout (OTL) features to display the Western, Bulgarian or Southern, Serbian/Macedonian forms. Depending on the choices made by the (computer) font designer, they may either be automatically activated by the ''local variant''locl feature for text tagged with an appropriate ISO 639-1, language code, 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, and the reader may not see the same result as the author intended.
Cyrillic alphabets
Among others, Cyrillic is the standard script for writing the following languages: Slavic languages: *Belarusian language, Belarusian *Bulgarian language, Bulgarian *Macedonian language, Macedonian *Russian language, Russian *Rusyn language, Rusyn *Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian language, Bosnian, Montenegrin language, Montenegrin and Serbian language, Serbian) *Ukrainian language, Ukrainian Non-Slavic languages of Russia: *Abaza language, Abaza *Adyghe language, Adyghe *Avar language, Avar *Azerbaijani language, Azerbaijani (in Dagestan) *Bashkir language, Bashkir *Buryat language, Buryat *Chechen language, Chechen *Chuvash language, Chuvash *Erzya language, Erzya *Ingush language, Ingush *Kabardian language, Kabardian *Kalmyk Oirat, Kalmyk *Karachay-Balkar language, Karachay-Balkar *Kildin Sami language, Kildin Sami *Komi language, Komi *Mari language, Mari *Moksha language, Moksha *Nogai language, Nogai *Ossetian language, Ossetian (in North Ossetia–Alania) *Romani orthography#Cyrillic script, Romani *Sakha language, Sakha/Yakut *Tatar language, Tatar *Tuvan language, Tuvan *Udmurt language, Udmurt *Siberian Yupik language, Yuit (Yupik) Non-Slavic languages in other countries: *Abkhaz language, Abkhaz *Aleut language, Aleut (now mostly in church texts) *Dungan language, Dungan *Kazakh language, Kazakh (to be replaced by Latin script by 2031) *Kyrgyz language, Kyrgyz *Mongolian language, Mongolian (to also be written with traditional Mongolian script by 2025) *Tajik language, Tajik *Tlingit alphabet#Cyrillic alphabets, Tlingit (now only in church texts) *Turkmen language, Turkmen (officially replaced by Latin script) *Uzbek language, Uzbek (generally replaced by Latin script but still used officially) *Yupik languages#Writing systems, Yupik (in Alaska) The Cyrillic script has also been used for languages of Alaska, Slavic Europe (except for Western Slavs, Western Slavic and Slovenian language, Slovenian), the Caucasus, the languages of Idel-Ural, Siberia, and the Russian Far East. The first alphabet derived from Cyrillic was Abur, used for the Komi language. Other Cyrillic alphabets include the Molodtsov alphabet for the Komi language and various alphabets for Caucasian languages.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 language, Azerbaijani, Uzbek language, Uzbek, Serbian language, Serbian, and Romanian language, Romanian (in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, Moldavian SSR until 1989 and 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 alphabet, Moldovan Cyrillic is official), Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. Uzbekistan still uses both systems, and Kazakhstan has officially begun a transition from Cyrillic to Latin (scheduled to be complete by 2025). The Russian 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 language, Chechen and Ingush language, 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 language, Serbian uses Serbian language#Writing system, 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 letters, and Transcription (linguistics), transcription to convey pronunciation. Standard Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems include: *Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic, Scientific transliteration, used in linguistics, is based on the Gaj's Latin alphabet, Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet. *The Working Group on Romanization Systems of the United Nations 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), used in North American libraries. *BGN/PCGN Romanization (1947), United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use). *GOST 16876-71, GOST 16876, a now defunct Soviet transliteration standard. Replaced by GOST 7.79-2000, which is based on ISO 9. *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, Romanization of Bulgarian, Bulgarian, romanization of Kyrgyz, Kyrgyz, romanization of Russian, Russian, romanization of Macedonian, Macedonian and romanization of Ukrainian, Ukrainian.Cyrillization
Representing other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called Cyrillization.Summary table
Computer encoding
Unicode
As of Unicode version , Cyrillic letters, including national and historical alphabets, are encoded across several Unicode block, blocks: *Cyrillic (Unicode block), CyrillicU+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
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 marks can be used after the respective letter (for example, : е́ у́ э́ etc.). Some languages, including Church Slavonic language, 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, Abkhaz language, Abkhaz, Aleut language, Aleut, Chuvash language, Chuvash, Kurdish language, Kurdish, and Moksha language, Moksha.
Other
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 8859-58-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by International Organization for Standardization *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 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. *MIK Code page, MIK8-bit native Bulgarian character encoding for use in DOS. *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 distributions for Belarusian and Bulgarian, but currently displaced by UTF-8. *GOST-main. *GB 2312Principally simplified Chinese encodings, but there are also the basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case). *JIS encoding, JIS and Shift JISPrincipally 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, adopted from traditional national 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 are unavailable, computer users sometimes use transliteration (translit) or look-alike (volapuk encoding) to type in languages that are normally written with the Cyrillic alphabet. Potentially, these proxy versions could be transformed programmatically into Cyrillic at a later date.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 cursive * Russian manual alphabet * Bulgarian Braille * Vladislav the Grammarian * Yugoslav Braille * Yugoslav manual alphabetInternet top-level domains in Cyrillic
* List of Internet top-level domains#Cyrillic script, gTLDs * .мон * .бг * .қаз * .рф * .срб * .укр * .мкд * .белNotes
Footnotes
References
* *Further reading
* * [cited in Šmid, 2002] * * in . *'The Lives of St. Tsurho and St. Strahota', Bohemia, 1495, Vatican Library *External links
The Cyrillic Charset Soup
overview and history of Cyrillic charsets.
Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts
a collection of writing systems and transliteration tables
review of Cyrillic charsets in Slavic Languages.
(archived 22 February 2014)
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 Cyrillic script, Bulgarian inventions Eastern Europe Central Asia