Cyrillic alphabets

Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.
Some of these are illustrated below; for others, and for more detail, see the links. Sounds are transcribed in the IPA. While these languages largely have phonemic orthographies, there are occasional exceptions—for example, Russian is pronounced in a number of words, an orthographic relic from when they were pronounced .
Spellings of names transliterated into the Roman alphabet may vary, especially й, but also г and ж.
Unlike the Latin script, which is usually adapted to different languages by adding diacritical marks/supplementary glyphs to standard Roman letters, by assigning new phonetic values to existing letters, or by the use of digraphs, the Cyrillic script is usually adapted by the creation of entirely new letter shapes. However, in some alphabets invented in the 19th century, such as Chuvash, umlauts and breves also were used.
Bulgarian and Bosnian Sephardim without Hebrew typefaces occasionally printed Judeo-Spanish in Cyrillic.

Spread

Non-Slavic alphabets are generally modelled after Russian, but often bear striking differences, particularly when adapted for Caucasian languages. The first few of these alphabets were developed by Orthodox missionaries for the Finnic and Turkic peoples of Idel-Ural in the 1870s. Later, such alphabets were created for some of the Siberian and Caucasus peoples who had recently converted to Christianity. In the 1930s, some of those languages were switched to the New Turkic Alphabet. All of the peoples of the former Soviet Union who had been using an Arabic or a different Asian script also adopted Cyrillic alphabets, and during the Great Purge in the late 1930s, all of the Latin alphabets of the peoples of the Soviet Union were switched to Cyrillic as well. The Abkhazian and Ossetian languages were switched to the Mkhedruli script, but after the death of Joseph Stalin, both also adopted Cyrillic. The last language to adopt Cyrillic was the Gagauz language, which had used Greek script before.
In Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, the use of Cyrillic to write local languages has often been a politically controversial issue since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as it evokes the era of Soviet rule and Russification. Some of Russia's peoples such as the Tatars have also tried to drop Cyrillic, but the move was halted under Russian law. A number of languages have switched from Cyrillic to either a Roman-based orthography or a return to a former script.
Cyrillic alphabets continue to be used in several Slavic and non-Slavic languages.

Common letters

The following table lists the Cyrillic letters which are used in the alphabets of most of the national languages which use a Cyrillic alphabet. Exceptions and additions for particular languages are noted below.

Upright	Italic	Name	IPA
А а	А а	A	/a/
Б б	Б б	Be	/b/
В в	В в	Ve	/v/
Г г	Г г	Ge	/g/
Д д	Д д	De	/d/
Е е	Е е
Ж ж	Ж ж
З з	З з	Ze	/z/
И и	И и	I
Й й	Й й	Short I	/j/
К к	К к	Ka	/k/
Л л	Л л	El	/l/
М м	М м	Em
Н н	Н н
О о	О о	O
П п	П п	Pe
Р р	Р р
С с	С с		/s/
Т т	Т т	Te	/t/
У у	У у	U
Ф ф	Ф ф		/f/
Х х	Х х
Ц ц	Ц ц
Ч ч	Ч ч
Ш ш	Ш ш
Ь ь	Ь ь
Ю ю	Ю ю
Я я	Я я

Slavic languages

Cyrillic alphabets used by Slavic languages can be divided into two categories:

West South Slavic languages, such as all varieties of Serbo-Croatian, often share the following letters, among others: Ј, Љ, Њ
East South Slavic languages and East Slavic languages, such as Bulgarian and Russian, often share the following letters, among others: Й, Щ, Ь, Ю, Я
South Slavic

Bulgarian

The Bulgarian alphabet shows the following features:

The Bulgarian names for the consonants are,, etc. instead of,, etc.
Е represents and is called "е". Unlike in other Slavic languages, the sound does not exist in native words, being replaced with Е in most cases.
The sounds and are represented by the digraphs дж and дз respectively, as in Belarusian and Ukrainian.
Short I represents, as in Russian.
Щ represents and is called "щъ" .
Ъ represents the vowel, and is called "ер голям" . Despite the official name being "big er", the letter is only referred to as that in the context of the alphabet, and is usually called in common speech. The vowel Ъ is sometimes approximated to the sound found in many languages for easier comprehension of its Bulgarian pronunciation for foreigners, but it is actually a back vowel, not a central vowel.
Ь is used on rare occasions, such as in the words 'каньон', 'шофьор', etc. It represents the sound, unless after Г, К and Л, in which case it palatalizes them to. It is called "ер малък" .
Before 1945, the letter Ѣ was used. In eastern dialects, the letter would be pronounced as or depending on the context, while in western dialects, it would be pronounced almost exclusively as. This led to cases in which words such as млѣко would be pronounced as "mlyako" in the east, but as "mleko" in the west. In 1945, the letter was abolished and replaced by Я or Е, depending on its use in the eastern dialects. The letter is also referred to as "е двойно".
Before 1945, the letter Ѫ was used. In early Bulgarian, the letter represented the nasal vowel. By the late 18th century however, the sound had shifted to, the same sound as Ъ, and was mostly used in its etymological locations. There are no differences between the two, apart from the fact that Ѫ can be used at the end of words. In 1945, the letter was abolished along with Ѣ and was replaced by А or Ъ. It is sometimes referred to as "голяма носовка" and "ъ широко".
For a brief period, the letter Ѭ was used, during the use of the Drinov Orthography, and represented the sound in words verb conjugations, for example in търпѭ. The letter Ѫ was also used for the same purpose alongside its normal usage. In 1899, both letters replaced in verb conjugations by Я and А in all cases as part of the new Ivanchov Orthography.

The Cyrillic alphabet was originally developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th – 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School.
It has been used in Bulgaria continuously since then, superseding the previously used Glagolitic alphabet, which was also invented and used there before the Cyrillic script overtook its use as a written script for the Bulgarian language. The Cyrillic alphabet was used in the then much bigger territory of Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Northern Greece, Romania and Moldova, officially from 893. It was also transferred from Bulgaria and adopted by the East Slavic languages in Kievan Rus' and evolved into the Russian alphabet and the alphabets of many other Slavic languages. Later, some Slavs modified it and added/excluded letters from it to better suit the needs of their own language varieties.

Serbian

Cyrillic alphabets are generally derived from Serbian Cyrillic. It, and by extension its descendants, differs from the East Slavic ones in that the alphabet has generally been simplified: Letters such as Й, Я, Ю, and Щ representing /j/, /ja/, /ju/, and /ɕ/ in Russian, respectively, have been removed. Instead, these are represented by the letter and digraphs,, and, respectively. Additionally, the letter Е, representing in Russian, is instead pronounced or, with being represented by. Alphabets based on the Serbian that add new letters often do so by adding an acute accent over an existing letter.
The Serbian alphabet shows the following features:

E represents.
Between Д and E is the letter Dje, representing, which looks like Tshe, except that the loop of the h curls farther and dips downwards.
Between И and К is the letter Je, representing, which looks like the Latin letter J.
Between Л and М is the letter Lje, representing, which looks like a ligature of Л and the Soft Sign.
Between Н and О is the letter Nje, representing, which looks like a ligature of Н and the Soft Sign.
Between Т and У is the letter Tshe, representing and looks like a lowercase Latin letter h with a bar. On the uppercase letter, the bar appears at the top; on the lowercase letter, the bar crosses the top at half of the vertical line.
Between Ч and Ш is the letter Dzhe, representing, which looks like Tse but with the descender moved from the right side of the bottom bar to the middle of the bottom bar.
Ш is the last letter.
Certain letters are handwritten differently, as seen in the adjacent image.