We continue our look into the different alphabets around the world. This week we’ll be looking at the Cyrillic alphabet!
Eastern Orthodox Slavic people first developed the Cyrillic writing system in the 10th Century. The original Cyrillic alphabet was comprised of 43 letters. These 43 letters included of the Greek alphabet, alongside new letters that were created to represent a sound specific to the Slavic language. Today, the Cyrillic alphabet ranges in the amount of letters that are part of it. This is because some languages that use it have dropped some letters, or have amalgamated others, however these alphabets range between 30-33 letters.
The Cyrillic alphabet is used by more than 50 languages worldwide, but most notably Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian. It is recognized at the third most used script in the European Union.
Below is an example of the Cyrillic alphabet, along with an example of how to say each letter. It’s not easy feat! Not many of the letters are similar to the common Latin alphabet used by English speakers.
References
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cyrillic.htm
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/148713/Cyrillic-alphabet
http://learnrussian.rt.com/alphabet/the-history-of-the-cyrillic-alphabet/