The
Cyrillic script () or
azbuka is an alphabetic
writing system developed in the
First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the
Preslav Literary School. It is the basis of
alphabets used in various languages, past and present, of Eastern Europe and Asia, especially those of
Slavic origin, and also non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian.
Cyrillic is derived from the Ancient Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and consonants from the older Glagolitic alphabet for sounds not found in Ancient Greek. It is named in honor of the two Eastern Roman Empire brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on. Modern scholars consider that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by early disciples of Cyril and Methodius (such as Clement of Ohrid).
With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek scripts.
Letters
As the Cyrillic script spread throughout the East and South Slavic territories, it was adopted for writing local languages, such as
Old East Slavic. Its adaptation to local languages produced a number of Cyrillic alphabets, discussed below.
{| cellpadding=4 style="font-size:larger; text-align:center;" class="Unicode" summary="Letters of the early Cyrillic alphabet"
|+ style="font-size:smaller;" | The early Cyrillic alphabet
|-
| А || Б || В || Г || Д || Е || Ж || Ѕ || З || И || І || К || Л || М || Н || О || П || Ҁ || Р || С || Т || Ѹ
|-
| Ф || Х || Ѡ || Ц || Ч || Ш || Щ || Ъ || Ꙑ || Ь || Ѣ || Ꙗ || Ѥ || Ю || Ѧ || Ѫ || Ѩ || Ѭ || Ѯ || Ѱ || Ѳ || Ѵ
|}
Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.
Yeri (Ы) was originally a ligature of Yer and I (Ꙑ). Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter I: Ꙗ (not ancestor of modern ya, Я, which is derived from Ѧ), , Ю (ligature of I and ОУ), , . Many letters had variant forms and commonly used ligatures, for example И = І = Ї, = , Оу ⁄ ОУ = , = .
The letters also had numeric values, based not on Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek ancestors.
{| cellpadding=4 style="text-align:center;" class="Unicode" summary="Letters of the Early Cyrillic alphabet"
|+ Cyrillic numerals
|-
| 1 || 2 || 3 || 4 || 5 || 6 || 7 || 8 || 9
|-
| А || В || Г || Д || Е || Ѕ || З || И || Ѳ
|-
|colspan="9"|
|-
| 10|| 20|| 30|| 40|| 50|| 60|| 70|| 80|| 90
|-
| І || К || Л || М || Н || Ѯ || О || П || Ч
|-
|colspan="9"|
|-
|100||200||300||400||500||600||700||800||900
|-
| Р || С || Т || Ѵ || Ф || Х || Ѱ || Ѡ || Ц
|}
The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers. Many of the letterforms differed from modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include adequate glyphs to reproduce the alphabet. In accordance with Unicode policy, the standard does not include letterform variations or ligatures found in manuscript sources unless they can be shown to conform to the Unicode definition of a character.
The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language.
Letterforms and typography
The development of Cyrillic
typography passed directly from the
medieval stage to the late
Baroque, without a
Renaissance phase as in
Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters (still found on many
icon inscriptions even today) show a marked tendency to be very tall and narrow; strokes are often shared between adjacent letters.
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms 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 fonts 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 fonts are much the same as modern Latin fonts of the same font family. The development of some Cyrillic computer typefaces from Latin ones has also contributed to the visual Latinization of Cyrillic type.
Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase letter forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic lowercase letters are essentially small capitals (with exceptions: Cyrillic ‹а, е, р, and у› adopted Western lowercase shapes, lowercase ‹ф› is typically designed under the influence of Latin ‹p›, lowercase ‹б› is a traditional handwritten form), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-caps glyphs.
Cyrillic fonts, as well as Latin ones, have roman and italic type (practically all popular modern fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are simply shared by both). However, the native font terminology in Slavic languages (for example, in Russian) does not use the words "roman" and "italic" in this sense. Instead, the nomenclature follows German naming patterns:
A roman type is called ''pryamoy shrift'' ("upright type")—compare with ''Normalschrift'' ("regular type") in German
An italic type is called ''kursiv'' ("cursive") or ''kursivniy shrift'' ("cursive type")—from the German word ''Kursive'', meaning italic typefaces and not cursive writing
Cursive handwriting is ''rukopisniy shrift'' ("hand-written type") in Russian—in German: ''Kurrentschrift'' or ''Laufschrift'', both meaning literally ‘running type’
Similarly to Latin fonts, italic and cursive types of many Cyrillic letters (typically lowercase; uppercase only for hand-written 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 fonts: for example, italic Cyrillic ‹''т''› is the lowercase counterpart of ‹''Т''› not of ‹''М''›.
As in Latin typography, a sans-serif face may have a mechanically sloped oblique type (''naklonniy shrift''—"sloped," or "slanted type") instead of italic.
A boldfaced type is called ''poluzhirniy shrift'' ("semi-bold type"), because there existed fully boldfaced shapes which are out of use since the beginning of the 20th century.
A bold italic combination (bold slanted) does not exist for all font families.
In Serbian, as well as in Macedonian, some italic and cursive letters are different from those used in other languages. These letter shapes are often used in upright fonts as well, especially for advertisements, road signs, inscriptions, posters and the like, less so in newspapers or books. The Cyrillic lowercase ‹б› has a slightly different design both in the roman and italic types, which is similar to the lowercase Greek letter Delta, ‹δ›.
The following table shows the differences between the upright and italic Cyrillic letters of the Russian alphabet. Italic forms significantly different from their upright analogues, or especially confusing to users of a Latin alphabet, are highlighted.
+ align=bottom style="text-align:left; font-size:smaller; " | Also available as a graphical image. |
а |
б | | в |
г |
д |
е |
ё |
ж |
з |
и |
й |
к |
л |
м |
н |
о |
п |
р |
с |
т |
у |
ф |
х |
ц |
ч |
ш |
щ |
ъ |
ы |
ь |
э |
ю |
я
|
| ''а'' |
''б'' | | > ''в'' |
> ''г'' |
> ''д'' |
''е'' |
''ё'' |
''ж'' |
''з'' |
> ''и'' |
> ''й'' |
''к'' |
''л'' |
''м'' |
''н'' |
''о'' |
> ''п'' |
''р'' |
''с'' |
> ''т'' |
''у'' |
''ф'' |
''х'' |
''ц'' |
''ч'' |
''ш'' |
''щ'' |
''ъ'' |
''ы'' |
''ь'' |
''э'' |
''ю'' |
''я''
|
Note: in some fonts or styles lowercase italic Cyrillic ‹д› (‹''д''›) may look like Latin ‹''g''› and lowercase italic Cyrillic ‹т› (‹''т''›) may look exactly like a capital italic ‹T› (‹''T''›), only small.
Cyrillic alphabets
Among others, Cyrillic is the standard script for writing the following
national languages:
Slavic languages: Bulgarian, Belarusian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Montenegrin, Ukrainian, and sometimes Bosnian.
Non-Slavic languages: Abkhaz, Bashkir, Aleut (now mostly in church texts), Erzya, Kazakh, Kildin Sami, Komi, Kyrgyz, Mari, Moksha, Mongolian, Ossetic, Romani (some dialects), Sakha (aka, Yakut), Tajik, Tatar, Tlingit (now only in church texts), Tuvan, Udmurt, Yuit (Siberian Yupik), and Yupik (in Alaska).
The Cyrillic script has also been used for languages of Alaska, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, 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 Komi language and various alphabet for Caucasian languages.
Name
Since the script was conceived and popularised by the followers of
Cyril and Methodius, rather than by Cyril and Methodius themselves, its name denotes homage rather than authorship. The name "Cyrillic" often confuses people who are not familiar with the script's history, because it does not identify a country of origin (contrast with "Greek alphabet"). Some call it the "Russian alphabet" because Russian is the most populous and influential alphabet based on the script. Some Bulgarian intellectuals, notably
Stefan Tsanev, have expressed concern over this, and have suggested that the Cyrillic script be called "Bulgarian alphabet" instead, for the sake of historical accuracy.
The Cyrillic script is also known as ''azbuka'', derived from the old names of the first two letters of most Cyrillic alphabets.
History
The Cyrillic script was created in the First Bulgarian Empire and is derived from 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 brothers born in Thessaloniki, Saints Cyril and Methodius who brought Christianity to the southern Slavs, or by their disciples. 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. Later Cyrillic spread among other Slavic peoples: Russians, Serbs and others, as well as among non-Slavic Vlachs and Moldavians.
Cyrillic and Glagolitic were used for the Church Slavonic language, especially the Old Church Slavonic variant. (See Early Cyrillic alphabet.) 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 the Old Bulgarian language soon spread north and became the lingua franca of Eastern Europe, where it came to also be known as Old Church Slavonic. The alphabet used for the modern Church Slavonic language in Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic rites still resembles early Cyrillic. However, over the following ten centuries, Cyrillic adapted to changes in spoken language, developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages, and was subjected to academic reforms and political decrees. Today, dozens of languages in Eastern Europe and Asia are written in Cyrillic alphabets.
Relationship to other writing systems
Latin script
A number of languages written in a Cyrillic alphabet have also been written in a
Latin alphabet, such as
Serbian,
Azerbaijani,
Uzbek and
Romanian (Republic of Moldova only). After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, official status shifted in some of the former republics from Cyrillic to Latin. The transition is complete in most of Moldova (except
Transnistria, where
Moldovan Cyrillic is official), Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, but Uzbekistan still uses both systems. 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 and
Ingush speakers, the law had political ramifications. For example, the separatist Chechen government mandated a Latin script (which, in fact, is noted by observers such as
Johanna Nichols to be a much better representation of the language), and is still used by many Chechens. Those in the diaspora especially refuse to use the Chechen Cyrillic alphabet, which they associate with Russian imperialism.
Serbia uses both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, but by Article 10 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia, the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was made official.
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 to convey
pronunciation.
Standard Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems include:
Scientific transliteration, used in linguistics, is based on the Latin Czech 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, a now defunct Soviet transliteration standard. Replaced by GOST 7.79, which is ISO 9 equivalent.
Volapuk encoding, an informal rendering of Cyrillic text over Latin-alphabet ASCII.
See also Romanization of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kyrgyz, Russian, Macedonian and Ukrainian.
Cyrillization
Representing other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called
Cyrillization.
Computer encoding
Unicode
In Unicode 6.0, letters of Cyrillic, including national and historical alphabets, are represented by four blocks:
Cyrillic U+0400–U+04FF
Cyrillic Supplement U+0500–U+052F
Cyrillic Extended-A U+2DE0–U+2DFF
Cyrillic Extended-B U+A640–U+A69F
The characters in the range U+0400 to U+045F are basically 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. Few exceptions are:
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;
few Old and New Church Slavonic combinations: Ѷ, Ѿ, Ѽ.
To indicate stressed or long vowels, combining diacritical marks can be used after respective letter (for example, : etc.).
Some languages, including 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, Aleut, Chuvash, Kurdish, and Mordvin.
Other
Punctuation for Cyrillic text is similar to that used in European Latin-alphabet languages.
Other character encoding systems for Cyrillic:
CP866 – 8-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 8859-5 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by International Organization for Standardization
KOI8-R – 8-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 7bit line which removed the senior bit from each byte - the result became a very rough, but readable, Latin transliteration of Cyrillic. Standard encoding of early 90s for UNIX systems and the first Russian Internet encoding.
KOI8-U – KOI8-R with addition of Ukrainian letters
MIK – 8-bit native Bulgarian character encoding for use in DOS
Windows-1251 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in Microsoft Windows. The simplest 8bit Cyrillic encoding - 32 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 2312 - Principally simplified Chinese encodings, but there are also basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case).
JIS and Shift JIS - Principally Japanese encodings, but there are also basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case).
Keyboard layouts
Each language has its own standard
keyboard layout, adopted from
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 or fonts are not available, computer users sometimes use transliteration or look-alike "
volapuk" encoding to type languages which are normally written with the Cyrillic alphabet.
See Keyboard layouts for non-Roman alphabetic scripts.
See also
.рф
.срб
.укр
.бг
Appendix of Cyrillic alphabets
Languages using Cyrillic
List of Cyrillic letters
Cyrillic digraphs
List of Cyrillic digraphs
Faux Cyrillic, real or fake Cyrillic letters used to give Latin-alphabet text a Soviet or Russian feel
Russian Manual Alphabet (the fingerspelled Cyrillic alphabet)
Cyrillic Alphabet Day
Vladislav the Grammarian
Russian cursive
Cyrillic (Unicode block)
References
Bringhurst, Robert (2002). ''The Elements of Typographic Style'' (version 2.5), pp. 262–264. Vancouver, Hartley & Marks. ISBN 0-88179-133-4.
Nezirović, M. (1992). ''Jevrejsko-španjolska književnost''. Sarajevo: Svjetlost. [cited in Šmid, 2002]
Šmid, Katja (2002). "", in ''Verba Hispanica'', vol X. Liubliana: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Liubliana. ISSN 0353-9660.
External links
Cyrillic Character Transliteration free software
Russian Alphabet with sound and animated handwriting of letters and words.
Sounds of the Russian alphabet, Listen to how the alphabet sounds and download the audio to your desktop
Russian alphabet audio, Hear the Russian alphabet both at normal speed and slowly, five letters at a time.
Minority Languages of Russia on the Net, a list of resources.
Information on Cyrillic alphabet and the handwritten script form of Cyrillic.
Using Cyrillic (Russian) under non-Russian MS Windows and on the Web - fonts, keyboard layouts, applications tune-up
Old Cyrillic Keyboard Layout, Old Bulgarian Cyrillic, it includes the characters Ѫ and Ѣ
A Survey of the Use of Modern Cyrillic Script, including the complete required repertoire of graphic characters, by J. W. van Wingen.
Tipometar: Serbian Cyrillic typography and typefaces
The Cyrillic Charset Soup, Roman Czyborra’s overview and history of Cyrillic charsets.
Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts, a collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pedersen. Includes PDF reference charts for many languages' transliteration systems.
Modern (not mouse-only) Virtual Real-time Russian Keyboard
Rusklaviatura: Real-time Cyrillic Converter
Uzbek Cyrillic - Latin converter
Russian Keyboard (Cyrillic Virtual Keyboard) with Russian Spell Checking.
RuWriter, a Russian Phonetic Keyboard Driver for Windows 7, Vista, and XP.
History and development of the Cyrillic alphabet
Ancient Scripts: Cyrillic
Letters of the Cyrillic alphabet (see also Cyrillic digraphs)
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af:Cyrilliese alfabet
als:Kyrillisches Alphabet
ar:أبجدية كيريلية
an:Alfabeto cirilico
ast:Alfabetu cirílicu
az:Kiril əlifbası
bjn:Abjad Sirilik
zh-min-nan:Kyril jī
ba:Кирил алфавиты
be:Кірыліца
be-x-old:Кірыліца
bs:Ćirilica
br:Lizherenneg kirillek
bg:Кирилица
ca:Alfabet ciríl·lic
cv:Кириллица
cs:Cyrilice
cy:Yr wyddor Gyrilig
da:Kyrilliske alfabet
de:Kyrillisches Alphabet
dsb:Cirilica
et:Kirillitsa
el:Κυριλλικό αλφάβητο
es:Alfabeto cirílico
eo:Cirila alfabeto
eu:Alfabeto ziriliko
fa:الفبای سیریلیک
hif:Cyrillic akchhar
fr:Alphabet cyrillique
fy:Sirillyske alfabet
fur:Alfabet cirilic
ga:Aibítir Choireallach
gv:Abbyrlhit Kyrillagh
gd:Aibidil Cirillach
gl:Alfabeto cirílico
gan:西里爾字母
xal:Кирилл бичлт
ko:키릴 문자
hi:सीरिलिक वर्णमाला
hsb:Kyriliski alfabet
hr:Ćirilica
io:Kirila alfabeto
id:Alfabet Sirilik
os:Кириллон алфавит
is:Kýrillískt stafróf
it:Alfabeto cirillico
he:אלפבית קירילי
jv:Aksara Sirilik
ka:კირილიცა
kk:Кириллица
sw:Kikyrili
ht:Alfabèt sirilik
krc:Кириллица
la:Abecedarium Cyrillicum
lv:Kirilica
lb:Kyrillescht Alphabet
lt:Kirilica
hu:Cirill ábécé
mk:Кирилица
ml:സിറിലിക് അക്ഷരമാല
mr:सिरिलिक वर्णमाला
arz:حروف كيريلى
ms:Abjad Cyril
mn:Кирилл үсэг
nah:Cirilo īmachiyōtlahtōltecpantiliz
nl:Cyrillisch alfabet
ja:キリル文字
no:Det kyrilliske alfabetet
nn:Det kyrilliske alfabetet
nrm:A b c Cyrillique
oc:Alfabet cirillic
uz:Kirill Alifbosi
pnb:سریلک الفابٹ
nds:Kyrillisch Alphabet
pl:Cyrylica
pt:Alfabeto cirílico
ro:Alfabetul chirilic
qu:Kirilitsa
ru:Кириллица
se:Kyrillalaš alfabehta
sq:Alfabeti cirilik
simple:Cyrillic alphabet
sk:Cyrilika
cu:Словѣньска аꙁъбоукꙑ
sl:Cirilica
sr:Ћирилица
sh:Ćirilica
su:Alfabét Sirilik
fi:Kyrillinen kirjaimisto
sv:Kyrilliska alfabetet
tl:Alpabetong Siriliko
ta:சிரில்லிக் எழுத்துக்கள்
kab:Ssirilik
roa-tara:Alfabbète cirilleche
tt:Kirill älifbası
th:อักษรซีริลลิก
tg:Алифбои кирилликӣ
tr:Kiril alfabesi
uk:Кирилиця
vi:Bảng chữ cái Kirin
zh-classical:西里爾字母
war:Ciriliko nga Abakadahan
bat-smg:Kėrėlėca
zh:西里尔字母