Glagolitic Alphabet

Glagolitic alphabet, script invented for the Slavic languages about 860 ce by the Eastern Orthodox Christian missionaries Constantine (later known as St. Cyril) and his brother Methodius (later St. Methodius). The two missionaries originated in Thessalonica (now Thessaloníki, Greece), on the southern edge of the Slavic-speaking world. They were sent from Byzantium to “Great Moravia”—likely centred around present-day Moravia in the Czech Republic. The language they used, though not identical with that of the Moravians, was usable by the latter. It is now called Old Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic.

Their mission in Moravia lasted only a few decades. The missionaries’ disciples then went to South Slavic regions (Bulgaria, Macedonia) where in the 900s they constructed a new script for Slavic, based on capital Greek letters, with some additions; confusingly, this later script became known as Cyrillic. Although dissimilar to Glagolitic in letter form, Cyrillic had approximately the same number of letters as Glagolitic and identical sound values for those letters.

Old Church Slavonic was written in Glagolitic for only about 300 years; Glagolitic gradually gave way to Cyrillic, which is still used for Church Slavonic service books in Orthodox Christian churches and (in modernized form) for certain modern Slavic languages: Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian. Glagolitic was kept longer among the (Roman Catholic) Croatians, both for their variant of Church Slavonic and for secular writing; secular inscriptions date from before 1100. Glagolitic gave way almost completely to Latin letters, though a few Croatian church communities (especially on the island of Krk) went on using Glagolitic-script service books into the 1900s, and Glagolitic is respected as part of the Croatian cultural heritage.