How a 9th-century school shaped the writing of 252 million people
Born in the First Bulgarian Empire, the Cyrillic script replaced the Glagolitic alphabet to unify Slavic-speaking Orthodox Christians. Today, it spans Eurasia, serving as a foundation for both Slavic and non-Slagvic languages, though its expansion has often been a tool of intense political and imperial shifts.
The Cyrillic script emerged during the 9th and 10th centuries at the Preslav Literary School. Created by the disciples of the Byzantine brothers Cyril and Methodius, it was designed to replace the earlier Glagolitic script. While the original creators developed Glagolitic, their students refined Cyrillic to serve the needs of the First Bulgarian Empire, eventually spreading it to Kievan Rus' and beyond.
Unlike the Latin script, which often adapts to new languages by adding diacritics or using digraphs, Cyrillic traditionally expands by inventing entirely new letter shapes. This allowed it to be modeled for various non-Slavic languages, including Turkic and Caucasian groups. In the 1870s, missionaries even developed specific Cyrillic-based alphabets for the Finnic and Turkic peoples of Idel-Ural, such as the Mari and Udmurt.
The script's history is deeply intertwined with political power. During the late 1930s, the Soviet Union mandated the switch from Latin to Cyrillic for many of its peoples. This era of 'Russification' remains a point of contention; in countries like Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan, the use of Cyrillic is often viewed through the lens of Soviet rule. Some groups, like the Tatars, have attempted to move away from the script, though such shifts are often met with legal or political resistance.
Today, the script is a massive linguistic engine, used by approximately 252 million people in Eurasia as of 2011. While Russia accounts for about half of this population, the alphabet supports a diverse array of languages, including Bulgarian, Serbian, Kazakh, and Mongolian.
Source: Cyrillic alphabets
