From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced /sɨˈrɪlɪk/; also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by six Slavic national languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian) as well as non-Slavic (Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik 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 organisations. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official alphabet of the EU.


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. It along with Glagolitic was formalized by the two Greek brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius, who brought Christianity to the southern Slavs, or their disciples. Paul Cubberly posits that while Cyril may have codified and expanded Glagolitic, it was his students, perhaps at the Preslav Literary School in Bulgaria, that developed Cyrillic from Greek in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books. The Cyrillic alphabet came to dominate over Glagolitic in the 12th century. It was disseminated along with the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language, and the alphabet used for modern Church Slavonic language in Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic rites still resembles early Cyrillic. However, over the following ten centuries, the Cyrillic alphabet 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 the Cyrillic alphabet.
As the Cyrillic alphabet spread throughout the East and South Slavic territories, it was adopted for writing local languages, such as Old Ruthenian. Its adaptation to the characteristics of local languages led to the development of its many modern variants, below.

Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.
Yeri (Ы) was originally a ligature of Yer and I (ЪІ). Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter I: ІА (ancestor of modern ya, я), Ѥ, Ю (ligature of I and ОУ), Ѩ, Ѭ. Many letters had variant forms and commonly-used ligatures, for example И=І=Ї, Ѡ=Ѻ, Оу ⁄ ОУ=Ѹ, ѠТ=Ѿ.
The letters also had numeric values, based not on the native Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek ancestors.

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. The current Unicode standard does not represent some significant letterform variations, and omits some characters, such as Cyrillic dotless I, iotified Yat, abbreviated Yer (Yerok), and many ligatures.
The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on April 4, 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language.

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 (Emperor) of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms in the early eighteenth century. Over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the alphabet. Thus, unlike modern Greek fonts that retained their own set of design principles (such as the placement of serifs, the shapes of stroke ends, and stroke-thickness rules), 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 letterforms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic lowercase letters are essentially small capitals (with exceptions: Cyrillic а, е, p, and y 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 variants (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-style font (Cyrillic, Latin, Greek...) is simply called pryamoy shrift ("upright font")—compare with Normalschrift ("regular font") in German
• An italic font is called kursiv (literally "cursive") or kursivniy shrift ("cursive font")—from the German word Kursive, meaning italic typefaces and not actual cursive
• Cursive handwriting is rukopisniy shrift ("hand-written font") in Russian—in German: Kurrentschrift or Laufschrift, both meaning literally ‘running font’

Similarly to the Latin fonts, italic and handwritten shapes of many Cyrillic letters (typically lowercase; uppercase only for hand-written or stylish types) are very different from their upright shapes. In certain cases, the correspondence between uppercase and lowercase glyphs does not coincide in Latin and Cyrillic fonts: for example, handwritten Cyrillic m is a possible lowercase counterpart of T instead of M.


As in Latin typography, a sans-serif face may have a mechanically-sloped oblique font (naklonniy shrift—"sloped," or "slanted font") instead of italic.
A boldfaced font is called poluzhirniy shrift ("semi-bold font"), because there existed fully-boldfaced shapes which are out of use since the beginning of the twentieth century.
A bold italic combination (bold slanted) doesn't exist for all font families.
In Serbian and 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 B, б, has a slightly different design both in the regular and italic/cursive shape, which is similar to the lowercase Greek letter Delta, δ.
The following table shows the differences between the upright and italic/cursive Cyrillic letters as used in Russian. Those entirely different from their analogues are highlighted.
If your browser does not support Cyrillic text, see this graphical version.

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