| Cyrillic alphabet | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | Alphabet |
| Spoken languages | Many East and South Slavic languages, and almost all languages in the former Soviet Union (see Languages using Cyrillic) |
| Time period | Earliest variants exist circa 940 |
| Parent systems |
Phoenician alphabet
|
| Sister systems | Latin alphabet Coptic alphabet Armenian alphabet Glagolitic alphabet |
| Unicode range | U+0400 to U+04FF U+0500 to U+052F U+2DE0 to U+2DFF U+A640 to U+A69F |
| ISO 15924 | Cyrl Cyrs (Old Church Slavonic variant) |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | |
The Cyrillic (pronounced ) script writing system is an alphabet developed in the 9th century[1] in Bulgaria, and used in the Slavic national languages of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Russian, Rusyn, Bosnian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and Mongolian. It also was used in past languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Siberia.
The Cyrillic alphabet is also known as azbuka, derived from the old names of the first two letters of most variant Cyrillic alphabets. Since the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official alphabet of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek alphabets.
Cyrillic is one of the two alphabets (together with Glagolitic) used in the Church Slavonic language, especially the Old Church Slavonic variant (see Early Cyrillic alphabet). Hence, expressions such as “И is the tenth letter of the Cyrillic alphabet” typically denote that meaning; moreover, not every Cyrillic-based language uses every letter of the alphabet.
Contents |
History
The Cyrillic alphabet was based on the Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and consonants from the older Glagolitic alphabet for sounds not found in Greek. Tradition holds that Cyrillic and Glagolitic were formalized either by the two Greek [2][3][4] brothers born in Thessaloniki, Saints Cyril and Methodius who brought Christianity to the southern Slavs, or by their disciples.[2][3][4]. Paul Cubberly posits that while Cyril may have codified and expanded Glagolitic, it was his students at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire that developed Cyrillic from Greek in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books.[5] Later the alphabet spread among other Slavic peoples - Russians, Serbs and others, as well as among non-Slavic Vlachs and Moldavians.
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This page was last modified on 19 March 2010 at 13:09.
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