Cyrillic alphabet
Кирилица
Cyrillic is the alphabet of Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Mongolian, and dozens of other languages across Eastern Europe and Central Asia — roughly 250 million readers worldwide. The Russian standard has 33 letters; other languages add or drop a handful.
All 33 letters
History
Cyrillic was created in the First Bulgarian Empire around 893 CE, attributed to the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius, two Byzantine Greek missionaries. Cyril himself actually invented an earlier script, Glagolitic, to write Old Church Slavonic; his students refined it by borrowing letterforms directly from Greek uncials, adding signs for Slavic sounds like /ʃ/, /tʃ/, /ts/. Over a millennium later, Peter the Great reformed Russian Cyrillic in 1708 to look more like Latin — the shapes you see today. In the 20th century the USSR exported Cyrillic to languages from Kazakh to Tajik, making it the official alphabet of dozens of non-Slavic peoples.
Things you might not know
- Cyrillic letters that look like Latin often sound completely different: Н is "n", Р is "r", С is "s", В is "v", У is "u".
- The letter Ё (yo) was officially added in 1783 but is routinely dropped in Russian print — readers are expected to infer it from context.
- Serbian and Russian Cyrillic print the letter T differently in italics, which is why Cyrillic italic can look unfamiliar even to Russians reading Serbian.
- Ъ (hard sign) and Ь (soft sign) are not sounds at all — they modify the consonant before them.