Where did these strange Russian letters come from, and who else uses them?

If you've opened this article, we have a couple of guesses as to why. Either your child asked something you didn't know how to answer. For instance, why Mommy's letters aren't like the ones at school. Or you're learning Russian yourself, got to the alphabet, and the first thing that annoys you is the letter «Р,» which looks like «P» and is read as «R.» Or you're just online at two in the morning, like all of us. That's okay. We ended up there ourselves ten years ago and don't seem to be getting out anytime soon.

We at Palme School have been working with bilingual children in the US and Canada for many years. Our team consists of methodologists with experience in Russian schools, who then gradually transitioned to working with children living outside of Russia. We sat down to write the article about the Cyrillic alphabet on a Saturday evening because of one seven-year-old boy. In his last class on Thursday, he asked if the Cyrillic alphabet was invented a long time ago, or if Cyril literally drew it just the other day. He lives in San Jose. We explained it for about twenty minutes, and he sat there nodding, and at the end said, «It's still strange.» And he's right. It is strange.

This is an attempt to explain Cyrillic normally. Not Wikipedia. Just like we usually explain it to our parents on Zoom.

What do we usually say to parents the first time?

The most frequent thing we hear from parents in the US and Canada on the first Zoom call is, «We want our child to be able to read Russian.» That's request number one. Number two is «so they can write a postcard to grandma.» Number three, by a large margin, is «so they understand grammar.» That is, the alphabet is almost always the starting point. And almost always, parents think it's simple. Learn 33 letters and that's it.

It's not easy. And not because there are a lot of letters, but because half of them look familiar but sound different, and the other half are unlike anything, and the brain of a seven-year-old child, who is already reading in English, starts to smoke somewhere around the third lesson. We've seen this happen dozens of times.

The mother of one of our students from Vancouver wrote to us on messenger after the third lesson: «He is crying. He says the Russian letters are broken.» He looked at the letter «Я» and saw a reversed «R». His brain refused to accept that the same visual form could be read differently in two alphabets. This is a typical stage, almost everyone goes through it. It passes in two to three weeks. But while it's happening, it hurts.

We're telling you this so you understand the context. Cyrillic isn't a neutral thing. It's emotionally charged. And when my parents and I start talking about its history, we're not talking about an academic fact, but about where this pain and this joy came from.

The story we tell children (and it's not from a textbook)

The story itself. Let's be brief because textbooks are everywhere, but a live retelling is somehow rare.

So, the ninth century. Around the middle. Slavs live in a vast territory from the Balkans to the north, speaking similar languages, but writing nothing. No treaties, no letters, no prayers. There's no one to write them and nothing to write them on.

In Great Moravia (which is approximately present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia), Prince Rastislav is sitting and thinking. He needs a Christian mission that speaks in the Slavic language. Not in Latin, which no one understands, but in a normal, spoken language. He writes to Byzantium, to Emperor Michael the Third: send people who can preach in our language. The Emperor sends two brothers from Thessaloniki, Constantine and Methodius. Constantine, later, before his death, will take monastic vows and become Cyril. But then he is still Constantine.

At that time, Thessaloniki was half a Slavic city. From childhood, the brothers heard Slavic speech on the streets. They knew how it worked. This is important because they weren't sitting at desks and learning the language from books; they knew it on a native level.

The brothers arrive in Moravia in 863 and immediately realize they can't do without an alphabet. And Cyril sits down and invents a new alphabet. Not Glagolitic. A different one. It's called Glagolitic. The letters in it look like geometric patterns, completely unlike Greek or Latin. Scholars are still discussing the sources of this unusual design to this day. According to one version, Cyril borrowed some elements from the Georgians; according to another, the Armenian alphabet had an influence; according to a third, he created the letters entirely himself, focusing only on the sounds of Slavic speech. Our student from Seattle saw Glagolitic for the first time in class and asked in surprise, «Can anyone even read this?» Yes, they can. We tried. Your eyes glide over it, not catching on anything.

The brothers work in Moravia for several years, translating the Gospel and basic liturgical texts into Glagolitic script. Then Cyril dies in Rome in 869. Methodius continues alone, but after his death in 885, the brothers' disciples are expelled from Moravia. They go south, to Bulgaria, and it is there, in the First Bulgarian Empire, that the most interesting things happen.

Cyril and Methodius's students in Bulgaria look at glagolitic and think: it's cool, but inconvenient. It's hard to write. The letters are complicated. And all educated people of that time already know the Greek alphabet. It is more or less universal in the Orthodox world. And the students decide: let's take the Greek alphabet, add new letters to it for Slavic sounds that don't exist in Greek, and get an alphabet that is both easier to learn and looks familiar.

And that's what they do. And they call the new alphabet Cyrillic. In honor of the teacher, Cyril. Although Cyril himself never saw this alphabet, he died fifteen years before that and created a completely different one, Glagolitic.

So, Cyril himself didn't create the Cyrillic alphabet. His students created it and gave it their teacher's name. When children hear this, they usually laugh. One boy from our Saturday group said, «It's like if I drew a picture, and then my friend drew another one and called it by my name.» Yes. Roughly like that. Hence the Confusion in English sourcesWhen they write about the origin of the Cyrillic alphabet, they often lump Cyril, Methodius, and their students together, even though they worked on different alphabets in different decades.

Why do half the letters look like English letters and half don't?

Here it is The question we get asked most often. And the answer to it isn't «because it happened that way.» The answer requires a bit of context.

Cyrillic and Latin share a common ancestor: the Greek alphabet. Not a direct ancestor, but a distant cousin, yet common. Latin formed around the seventh century BC, at the time when the Romans adapted the Greek script for their own language. They didn't borrow the entire Greek alphabet, but only a part of it, and slightly changed the forms and sounds. Therefore, Latin has letters of clearly Greek origin (A, B, E, K, M, O, P, T), but their sounds are often different from those in Greek.

Cyrillic appeared more than a thousand years later than Latin. And its creators, the students of Cyril and Methodius, took the very same Greek alphabet as a basis, but in its later, medieval form. They preserved the Greek letters and Greek sounds. Therefore:

The Russian «R» is the Greek «rho,» and it sounds like «R.» The Russian «N» is the Greek «eta,» and it sounds like «N.» The Russian «V» is the Greek «beta,» and it sounds like «V.» The Russian «S» is the Greek «sigma» in its later form, and it sounds like «S.».

And in Latin, these same Greek letters took a different path. The Latin «P», yes, is the same Greek «rho,» but the Romans decided it would sound like «P». The Latin «B» is the Greek «beta,» but with the earlier sound «B» preserved. And so on.

So the Russian «R» and the English «P» are literally the same letter, the Greek «rho,» just from different branches of evolution.

This is the explanation we give to adults. We explain it differently to children. We say it like this: imagine you have a cousin. You are both from the same grandfather, but you grew up in different countries. One speaks English, the other speaks Russian. You both look like him, but you have different habits. So, the Russian «R» and the English «P» are like cousins. The same face, different personalities.

A boy from Boston heard this last week and said, «So the Russian letter is my cousin.» Yes, our joy. Exactly.

Besides «cousin» letters, Russian has letters that simply don't exist in the Latin alphabet. These are Ш, Щ, Ж, Ц, Ч, Ы, Ъ, Ь. They were invented specifically for Slavic sounds because Greek and Latin did not have such sounds. These letters are the most "Russian." You just need to learn them from scratch. Children usually memorize them faster than the "cousin" letters precisely because there's no conflict with the English-speaking brain.

One of our nine-year-old students calls the letter «Zh» a spider. She says, «Zzz-zzz-zzz, it's crawling.» Since then, half the group also calls it a spider. Another girl calls «Shch» a «lizard» because it has a tail. This isn't a method; it's just how the children cope on their own. And you know what? It works.

How the alphabet lost letters and gained one

Here's a fact that usually shocks adults.

The Old Russian alphabet had forty-three letters, not thirty-three. Forty-three. Not all of them represented unique sounds; many duplicated each other. But they were written differently, and schoolchildren up to the twentieth century were forced to memorize them all. If you Google "Cyrillic history" in English, almost all articles bypass this point, and it's a shame because reforms are the most human part of the entire history.

There was the letter «yat» (ѣ). It sounded exactly the same as the regular «ye» (е). But it was written in certain words out of tradition, and the rules for when to write «ye» and when to write «yat» were so confusing that special rhymes existed for memorization. Before the revolution, this was one of schoolchildren's biggest nightmares. If you wrote «khleb» (bread) with «ye» (е) when it should have been with «yat» (ѣ), you got a failing grade.

There was the letter «fita» (ѳ). It sounded like «f». It was written in words of Greek origin. «Fyodor» was written with «fita», and «fonar» with the regular «f».

There was «izhitsa» (ѵ). It sounded like «i». It was rare, mostly found in church words, for example, «miro».

It was the «tenth »i«» (і). It sounded the same as "i," but was written before other vowels.

There was a «yer» (ъ). This is a hard sign, and we still have it now, but in ancient times it was written at the end of every word that ended in a consonant. That is, «bread» was written «khleb». Why? Just because.

And in 1918, after the revolution, the Bolsheviks carried out an orthographic reform. They removed yat, fita, izhitsa, and i-desyaterichnoye, and the hard sign at the end of words was abolished. Thirty-two characters remained. Even later, in 1942, the letter «e» was officially established in the alphabet, which technically appeared in the eighteenth century but was long considered optional. And there were thirty-three letters, as there are now.

One of our student's grandmothers sent an old church book from Kaluga, not a primer, but something printed in the early twentieth century. The girl looked at it and said, «This isn't Russian.» The grandmother laughed and said, «It's Russian, just old.» The girl flipped through it for about ten minutes and found a letter she didn't recognize. She showed it to us on Zoom and asked, «What's this?» It was fita (ѳ). A hundred years ago, this letter was in every book. Now, even Russian children don't recognize it.

Who else writes with these letters (a map in your head)

In class, we often show children a map. Just a Google image. Where in the world they use Cyrillic. And almost always they are surprised.

Children think Cyrillic is Russian. That's it. Maybe Ukrainian, if someone in the family said «Grandma is from Kyiv.» But when we list the countries, their eyes go wide. In English guides, this is usually called "countries that use Cyrillic," and the list is longer than you'd think. Let's list them.

Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan. Partially Moldova. Partially recognized territories like Abkhazia. This is more than ten states and hundreds of millions of people.

The figures for the number of speakers are approximate and include native speakers as a first language. Moldova partially uses the Cyrillic alphabet (in Transnistria).

Now, a question. All these countries speak different languages. Russian is East Slavic. Ukrainian is also East Slavic, but different. Bulgarian is South Slavic. Serbian is South Slavic, but different. Mongolian isn't Slavic at all; it's from the Turkic family. Tajik is from the Iranian family, a relative of Persian. Kazakh and Kyrgyz are Turkic. They all have completely different grammar, different vocabulary, different everything. But the letters are the same.

This means that if you learn the Russian alphabet, you will be able to read (not understand, but precisely read, pronounce aloud) texts in Bulgarian, Serbian, Mongolian, and Kazakh. They have small differences. In Bulgarian, for example, the letters Y and E are absent. Mongolian has two additional letters, Ө and Ү, which are not in Russian. But the foundation is the same.

One boy from our group, Matvey, flew to Belgrade with his parents. He returned to class and said, «I read the signs. I really read them. I didn't understand what was written, but I read them.» It was a shock for him. Because up to that moment, he perceived the Russian alphabet as a quirk of his mother's, which no one except his mother used. But it turned out that a whole country writes with the same letters.

Bulgarians are a whole separate story. For Bulgarians, the Cyrillic alphabet is something like a national brand. There's logic to this: the alphabet was invented in the territory of the then Bulgaria, in the First Kingdom, not in Greece or Rus'. Hence the country's main cultural holiday, celebrated every twenty-fourth of May. It's called the Day of Bulgarian Literacy and Culture. The scene on this day is roughly the same everywhere: schoolchildren with bouquets, teachers in folk costumes, songs in city squares. It's a big day.

When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, it brought Cyrillic with it. Cyrillic became the third official alphabet of the EU after Latin and Greek. Since then, the word «euro» has appeared on euro banknotes in its Cyrillic spelling. In small letters, next to the Latin «EURO» and Greek «ΕΥΡΩ.» Nobody notices until it's pointed out.

Serbia has a unique characteristic. Both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets exist there simultaneously and are official. Newspapers can come out in two versions. Signs are often duplicated. One employee receives a letter in Cyrillic, writes a response in Latin, and such correspondence doesn't faze anyone. There are virtually no parallels to this unique dual-alphabet culture found anywhere else in the world. Kazakhstan is moving in the opposite direction, having launched a gradual transition from Cyrillic to Latin. The program was announced in 2017 with a deadline of 2025, but the finish line was later moved to 2031. At present, Kazakhs still use Cyrillic, but Latin textbooks are already in schools, street signs are being replaced, and teachers are undergoing training. In ten years, the map of the Cyrillic world will look different.

Cyrillic in space

This is part of an article that we added specifically because our youngest student, Arseniy, who is seven years old, once asked: «Do they write in Russian on a space rocket?». An excellent question.

Yes. On Russian spacecraft, all instruments are labeled in Cyrillic. Yuri Gagarin kept a flight log in Cyrillic in 1961. On the International Space Station, there are two working languages: Russian and English. This means that all labels, instructions, and duplicate inscriptions on equipment are in both alphabets. American astronauts who fly to the ISS are required to take a Russian course and learn the Cyrillic alphabet. Without this, they will not be allowed to work on the station.

This is an important detail because it changes the child's worldview. He thought Cyrillic was only needed by his grandma for postcards. But it turns out Cyrillic hangs above the dashboard in Earth's orbit, and an American astronaut reads it every day. For anyone going to space, Russian and Cyrillic are part of the required basics. We explain this simply to the children in our classes: if you dream of astronautics or working in the space industry, learn Russian letters; they will be more useful to you than French ones.

Why are there two alphabets in Europe and what are the consequences?

This is a topic that we usually cover in a separate lesson because it's a big one.

There are not two alphabets in Europe. There is one alphabet, the Latin alphabet, which is used by almost all European languages. Some languages, such as Greek and Cyrillic, use different alphabets. However, this does not mean that there are two alphabets in Europe. It just means that some languages have adopted different writing systems.

Short answer: Historically, that's how it developed. The long answer is more interesting.

As we've already discussed, the Latin alphabet is over a thousand years older than the Cyrillic alphabet. Latin went west with the Roman Empire. When the empire collapsed in the fifth century, the Latin alphabet remained in the western part of the former empire. It was adopted by the Germanic, Celtic, and Romance peoples. They adapted it to their languages, adding diacritical marks (dots, dashes, and hooks above letters), and inventing new letter combinations. This is how all modern European alphabets based on Latin came about: French, German, Italian, English, Polish, Czech, and so on.

Cyrillic appeared much later and followed a different route. It spread with Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium. Orthodoxy didn't go west, but east and southeast. Therefore, the Cyrillic zone includes the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Rus', then Mongolia and Central Asia.

The border between «Latin» and «Cyrillic» Europe very clearly coincides with the border between Catholicism (and later Protestantism) and Orthodoxy. Countries that were historically Catholic write in Latin script. Countries that were Orthodox write in Cyrillic script. There are few exceptions, but they do exist. For example, Romania switched from Cyrillic to Latin script in the nineteenth century, even though it is an Orthodox country. This was a political decision related to the national self-determination of Romanians as a «Latin» people among their Slavic neighbors.

Or another example. Croats and Serbs speak practically the same language. Linguists still argue whether it's one language or two. But Serbs write in Cyrillic because they are Orthodox. Croats write in Latin because they are Catholic. The difference is not in the language, but in which church their ancestors attended. This is one of the most vivid examples of how religion shapes writing systems.

We tell parents this story when they ask why Russian couldn't be translated into Latin script, like Turkish or Kazakh. The answer is: it could. Technically, it could. The Bolsheviks did this in the 1920s and seriously discussed it. They even started translating some of the languages of the small peoples of the USSR into Latin script. But then Stalin, in the 1930s, reversed the process and translated them all into Cyrillic. Politics.

But overall, in our opinion, no alphabet is better than another. They are simply different. Cyrillic has its conveniences (a letter is almost always one sound, few complex reading rules). Latin has its own (more universal, present on all keyboards by default). Whichever is more convenient for you is yours. If you are Russian, Cyrillic is yours, and there is no point in being ashamed of it or feeling that it is «worse».

What about a child who grows up in America and only sees Cyrillic at home

This is a topic we work with every day. The main pain point for our parents.

A child is growing up in the USA or Canada. At school, they write in Latin script for eight hours a day. English books, English textbooks, English text messages. At home, Mom speaks Russian, but most often writes to the child in messenger apps using Latin script because it's faster. And the child, at best, sees Cyrillic on postcards from Grandma once a year and on the covers of two children's books that Mom brought from Moscow three moves ago.

Result: The child has excellent Russian listening comprehension, can chat with their grandmother about the weather and the cat, but doesn't recognize most letters. This is called passive bilingualism with a disrupted written component.

And when such a child comes to us for the first time, the first thing we tell them is: your Russian letters are not a weird thing, they are a superpower. You will soon be read in two alphabets. Few people in your class at school can do that.

It really works. The children start to see Cyrillic as something cool, not just their mom's quirk. After a month, they're already bragging to their American friends that they can write in different letters. They show off their friends' names written in Cyrillic. One of our students wrote her entire class in Russian and gave each of them their name in Russian in an envelope. The teacher at school later wrote to the parents; it was touching.

Here at Palme School, we don't treat the alphabet as a separate subject. We don't have children memorize letters in order. It's pointless and boring; children lose interest after two sessions. Instead, we approach it through words. From birth, a child recognizes the word «mama» by ear. We show them how it looks on paper. Four letters, two of which are repeated. Half the alphabet is already familiar. Then the word «papa.» Two more new letters. «Cat.» Two more. And so, gradually, through words the child already knows, we build the alphabet.

Average speed: in three weeks, the child will confidently recognize all thirty-three letters and read simple words. In two months, they will read short texts. In six months, they will read age-appropriate books.

It's trickier with cursive. Russian cursive is so different from print letters that it looks like a separate alphabet. A lowercase «т» in cursive looks like an English «m.» A lowercase «д» looks like an English «g.» A lowercase «и» looks like an English «u.» For a child who has already learned to read English cursive, this is a disaster. Therefore, we first fully master print letters, and cursive comes as a second stage, usually six months to a year later.

Why would your child need all of this?

The most frequent question from parents is: why does a child need Cyrillic if they live in America and will most likely live their entire life in an English-speaking country?

We answer like this. Cyrillic is the key. Not to the language itself (a child hears the language at home anyway), but to a huge cultural layer that is inaccessible without Cyrillic.

These are grandma's postcards. These are Russian children's books, of which at most five percent have been translated into English. These are cartoons with subtitles. This is the opportunity to one day read Pushkin, Chekhov, and Tolstoy in the original, not in a foreign translation. This is the ability to correspond with your cousin from St. Petersburg in his native language. This is a chance to work with Russian-speaking clients or partners if the child ever gets involved in international business, journalism, or diplomacy.

And this is another thing that's difficult to articulate but that we see at every single one of our graduations. A child who has mastered the Cyrillic alphabet feels confident in a Russian-speaking environment. They aren't shy when spoken to in Russian. They don't hide behind their mom. They pick up the phone when grandma calls. They write in the family chat in Russian. They are included in their Russian family, rather than standing beside it like a tourist.

It's worth those year and a half to two years of regular classes. We say this as a team that has seen both sides for many years. Children who don't learn Cyrillic often come back themselves around sixteen and say, "I want to read Russian, teach me." And we teach them. But it's much easier to do it at seven than at sixteen.

The first two lessons are free. You can come to meet us, see how the class is structured, and talk to the teacher. You can find the registration link and more details at school website. We also have Visual guide to the alphabet, which can be downloaded and printed, and more information about the class format is available at FAQ page.