Cyrillic Alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system for letters used in many languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, and numerous others in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Like the Latin alphabet, it has letters representing vowels and consonants, each of which generally corresponds to a single sound.

The alphabet was originally derived from the Greek uncial script, adapted with new letters to represent sounds absent in Greek. Its name derives from Cyril (also known as Constantine), who together with his brother Methodius worked in the 9th century on writing systems for Slavic languages. The earliest alphabet they created is often counted as Glagolitic, with Cyrillic emerging later from Bulgarian scholarly circles.

Structure of Letters

Many Cyrillic letters resemble the Latin alphabet but represent different sounds; for example, В represents the sound "v", Р represents "r", С represents "s", and Н represents "n". Other letters, such as Ж, Ш, Щ, Ц, and Ч, represent sounds that Latin requires two or three letters to express. There also exist marks without independent sound value, such as ь and ъ, which modify the sound of the preceding consonant.

Language Variation

Each language uses a specific number and type of letters. Russian today has 33 letters. Ukrainian has letters absent from Russian, such as і and ї, whereas Russian uses ы. Serbian added letters such as ј, љ, њ, ђ, ћ, џ, and typically uses both Cyrillic and Latin simultaneously (digraphia). Non-Slavic languages using the alphabet, such as Kazakh and Mongolian, added diacritical marks to represent their own sounds.

Historical Change

In the 18th century, the Russian state introduced a new, standardized letter form that approximated the appearance of Latin typography in printing. Following the 1917 Revolution, alphabet reform removed letters without independent sound value. During the Soviet Union period, many Central Asian and Caucasian languages were written in Cyrillic; after 1991, countries such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan shifted to the Latin alphabet, while Kazakhstan announced a gradual transition plan.

Modern Use

Cyrillic is one of the official scripts of the European Union, following Bulgaria's accession. Computer systems support it through Unicode, which has designated areas for Cyrillic letters. There are also standard methods for transliterating Cyrillic letters into Latin characters, used for personal names and place names.