Early Cyrillic alphabet Bulgarian Empire in order to write the Old Church Slavonic language. The modern Cyrillic script is still used primarily for some Slavic languages and for East European and Asian languages that were under Russian cultural influence during the 20th century. Among some of the traditionally culturally influential countries using it are Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia, Ukraine. The earliest form of manuscript Cyrillic, known as "ustav," was based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and by letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for consonants not found in Greek. The Glagolitic alphabet was created by the monk Saint Cyril, possibly with the aid
Glagolitic script By the time of the devastating Italianization movements under Fascist Italy in the early 20th century, numerous independent events had already greatly reduced the area of the liturgical use of Glagolitic. The tradition that the alphabet was designed by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius has not been universally accepted. A less common belief, contradicting allochthonic Slovene origin, was that the Glagolitic was created or used in the 4th century by St. Jerome (Latin: "Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus"), hence the alphabet is sometimes named Hieronymian. It is also acrophonically called azbuki from the names of its first two letters in Bulgaria, on