History of Russian alphabet (Cyrillic alphabet)
The modern Russian alphabet (русский алфавит, transliteration: russkiy alfavit) is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet. It was introduced into Kievan Rus’ at the time of Vladimir the Great’s conversion to Christianity. [Source]
The Cyrillic alphabet also called azbuka, from the old names of the first two letters of almost all its variants) is a writing system, shared by six Slavic national languages (Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian) as well as non-Slavic (Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Tuvan 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 Cyrillic alphabet was invented by brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius.
The Cyrillic alphabet achieved its current form in 1708 during the reign of Peter the Great. Peter the Great, Tsar 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, modern Cyrillic fonts are much the same as modern Latin fonts of the same font family.
Four letters were eliminated from the Russian alphabet in a reform (1917-1918).
The Cyrillic alphabet has been adapted to write over 50 different languages written using the Cyrillic alphabet, mainly in Russia, across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In many cases additional letters are used, some of which are adaptations of standard Cyrillic letters, while others are taken from the Greek or Latin alphabets. Wikipedia has more on that here.
Svetlana Astanaeva,
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