Origin

The Cyrillic alphabet is named after St. Cyril, a missionary from Byzantium. It was invented sometime during the 10th century AD, possibly by St. Kliment of Ohrid, to write the Old Church Slavonic language. The Cyrillic alphabet achieved its current form in 1708 during the reign of Peter the Great. Four letters were eliminated from the alphabet in a 1917/18 reform.

Macedonian singer Vlatko Stefanovski singing about cyrillic alphabet (Kirilica, Kirilitsa)

The Cyrillic alphabet has been adapted to write over 50 different languages, mainly in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. In many cases additional letters are used, some of which are adaptations of standard Cyrillic letters, while others are taken from the Greek or Latin alphabets.

Development of the Cyrillic alphabet

10th century version, as used to write Old Church Slavonic

1708 version

The letters in blue had fallen out of use by the 1800 century. The letters in red were eliminated in the 1918 reform.

1918 version

Cyrillic alphabet

Кірыліца (BY)
Кирилица (BG)
Кириллица (KG)
Кириллица (KZ)
Кирилица (MK)
Кирилл үсэг (MN)
Кириллон алфавит (OS)
Кириллица (RU)
Ћирилица (RS)
Алифбои кирилликӣ (ТЈ)
Кириллица (TM)
Кирилиця (UR)

The Cyrillic alphabet or rather Cyrillic script (also called azbuka, from the old names of the first two letters of almost all its variants) is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire, shared by seven Slavic national languages (Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian) as well as non-Slavic (Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Tuvan of the former Soviet Union; and Mongolian). It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past. Not all letters in the Cyrillic alphabet are used in every language that is written with it.
The alphabet has official status with many organizations. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official alphabet of the EU, along with Latin and Greek.

Tags: slavic write language azbuka script saint cyril methodius