Cyrillic alphabet

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  → Greek alphabet   → Early Cyrillic alphabet    → Cyrillic 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 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.

History

A page from Azbuka, the first Russian textbook, printed by Ivan Fyodorov in 1574. This page features the Cyrillic alphabet.

Main article: Early Cyrillic alphabet

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 has traditionally been credited to Saint Cyril, who brought Christianity to Bulgaria. However, it appears that Cyril may have codified and expanded Glagolitic, but that 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.^[1]

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.

A page from the Church Slavonic Grammar of Meletius Smotrytsky (1619).

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.

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 (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.^[2]

Comparison of some upright and hand-written letters (Ge, De, I, I kratkoye, Em, Te and Tse. Top row is set in Georgia font, bottom in Kisty CY)

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.^[3] 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.

The standard Cyrillic letters compared to the ones used in Serbian and Macedonian, both in regular shape and italic/cursive

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.

Note: in some fonts or styles small cursive Cyrillic д (д) may look like Latin g and small cursive Cyrillic т (т) may look exactly like a capital cursive T (T), only small.

As used in various languages

Main articles: Cyrillic alphabet variants, Languages using Cyrillic, and List of Cyrillic letters

Distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet worldwide. This map shows the countries in the world that use the Cyrillic alphabet as the official script in dark green and as one of official in light green.

Sounds are indicated using the IPA. These are only approximate indicators. While these languages by and large have phonemic orthographies, there are occasional exceptions-for example, Russian его (yego, 'him/his'), which is pronounced [jɪˈvo] instead of [jɪˈgo].

Note that transliterated spellings of names may vary, especially y/j/i, but also gh/g/h and zh/j.

Derived alphabets

The first alphabet partly derived from Cyrillic is Abur, applied to the Komi language. Other writing systems derived from Cyrillic were applied to Caucasian languages and the Molodtsov alphabet for Komi language.

Relationship to other writing systems

Latin alphabet

A number of languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet have also been written in the Latin alphabet, such as Azerbaijani, Uzbek and Moldavian. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, official status shifted from Cyrillic to Latin. The transition is complete in most of Moldova and Azerbaijan, but Uzbekistan still uses both systems.

Romanization

There are various systems for romanization of Cyrillic text, including transliteration to convey Cyrillic spelling in Latin characters, and transcription to convey pronunciation.

Standard Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems include:

• Scientific transliteration, used in linguistics, is based on the Latin Croatian 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, and Ukrainian.

Cyrillization

Representing other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called Cyrillization.

Computer encoding

Further information: Cyrillic characters in Unicode

In Unicode 5.1, letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, including national and historical varieties, are represented by four blocks:

• Cyrillic 0400–04FF
• Cyrillic Supplement 0500–052F
• Cyrillic Extended-A 2DE0–2DFF
• Cyrillic Extended-B A640–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, "combining acute accent" U+0301: ы́ э́ ю́ я́ etc.).

Some languages, including New Church Slavonic, are still not fully supported.

Unicode 5.1, released on April 4, 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.^[4]

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
• ISO/IEC 8859-5 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by International Organization for Standardization
• KOI8-R – 8-bit native Russian character 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. 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^[5] 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.

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). "Los problemas del estudio de la lengua sefardíPDF (603 KiB)", in Verba Hispanica, vol X. Liubliana: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Liubliana. ISSN 0353-9660.

See also

• .рф
• Languages using Cyrillic
• List of Cyrillic letters
• 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

External links

• 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
• 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.
• Unicode Code Charts "Cyrillic"PDF (174 KB)
• Unicode Code Charts "Cyrillic Supplement"PDF (69.8 KB)
• 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.
• Virtual Cyrillic Keyboard, type Russian/Ukrainian even in Tokio same way as you do it at home
• Rusklaviatura: Real-time Cyrillic Converter