The Cyrillic alphabet () is a native Slavic alphabet. It is now used to write Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Rusyn, Bulgarian, Macedonian and for most South Slavic languages. It was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 10th century. The Soviet Union made many non-Slavic languages in the Caucasus, Siberia, Central Asia and in northern Russia to be written in Cyrillic.