Cyrillic Alphabet

Cyrillic
Type	Alphabet
Languages	National script of:  Belarus  Bosnia and Herzegovina (also Latin)  Bulgaria  Kazakhstan  Kyrgyzstan  Macedonia  Mongolia (also Mongolian Script)  Montenegro (also Latin)  Russia  Serbia  Tajikistan  Ukraine (see Languages using Cyrillic)
Time period	Earliest variants exist c. 940
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic script Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Cyrillic
Sister systems	Latin alphabet Coptic alphabet Armenian alphabet Georgian alphabet Glagolitic alphabet
Direction	Left-to-right
ISO 15924	Cyrl, 220 Cyrs (Old Church Slavonic variant)
Unicode alias	Cyrillic
Unicode range	U+0400–U+04FF Cyrillic U+0500–U+052F Cyrillic Supplement U+2DE0–U+2DFF Cyrillic Extended-A U+A640–U+A69F Cyrillic Extended-B U+1C80–U+1C8F Cyrillic Extended-C

National script of:

The Cyrillic script /sᵻˈrɪlɪk/ is a writing system used for various alphabets across eastern Europe and north and central Asia. It is based on the Early Cyrillic, which was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, in parts of southeastern Europe and northern Eurasia, especially those of Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011^[update], around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them. 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 script and Greek script.

Cyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including some ligatures. These additional letters were used for Old Church Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. The script is named in honor of the two Byzantine brothers,Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on. Modern scholars believe that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by early disciples of Cyril and Methodius.