Cyrillic

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Revision as of 21:35, 28 May 2006 by 81.159.177.148 (talk)
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More than 200 languages have been written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The main ones are Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Macedonian. Each has its own peculiarities, including letters specific to one but not another. Here is the most common Russian keyboard layout.

 ё 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
    й ц у к е н г ш щ з х ъ \
     ф ы в а п р о л д ж э
      я ч с м и т ь б ю /
 Ё ! " # * : , . ; ( ) _ +
    Й Ц У К Е Н Г Ш Щ З Х Ъ |
     Ф Ы В А П Р О Л Д Ж Э
      Я Ч С М И Т Ь Б Ю ?

Turkic and other native languages

In the Russia and central Asian countries there are many Turkic languages that are also written with Cyrillic. In most cases these languages have added 4 to 6 additional letters that are not used in Slavic languages. The same situation applies to native languages throughout Russia.

Unicode has codepoints for all these characters however it is not clear how many fonts have implemented these extra characters. In the case of Turkic languages, some of them are also written with a Latin-based alphabet but it may also have additional letters and it may not be possible for unambiguous machine transliteration between alphabets. In the countries in which both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are used, people are used to seeing some content in one alphabet and some in another.