Cyrillic script is an alphabet developed in the 9th century in Bulgaria, and used in the Slavic national languages of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and Mongolian. It also was used in past languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Siberia.
The Cyrillic alphabet is also known as azbuka, derived from the old names of the first two letters of most variant Cyrillic alphabets. Since the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official alphabet of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek alphabets.
The picture above is a page from Azbuka, the first Russian textbook, printed by Ivan Fyodorov in 1574. This page features the Cyrillic alphabet.
Below you can see distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet worldwide. This map shows the countries in the world that use the Cyrillic alphabet as the official script in dark green and as one of multiple official scripts in light green.
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