Glagolitic Alphabet

Glagolitic is an alphabet written left to right, one letter per sound, with vowels of its own. The core order and the letters' sound values are: Ⰰ azu (a), Ⰱ buky (b), Ⰲ vede (v), Ⰳ glagoli (g), Ⰴ dobro (d), Ⰵ yestu (e), Ⰶ zhivete (ž), Ⰷ dzelo (dz), Ⰸ zemlja (z), Ⰹ izhe and Ⰻ i (two letters for i), Ⰼ djervi (a soft g or đ), Ⰽ kako (k), Ⰾ ljudije (l), Ⰿ myslite (m), Ⱀ nashi (n), Ⱁ onu (o), Ⱂ pokoji (p), Ⱃ ritsi (r), Ⱄ slovo (s), Ⱅ tvrido (t), Ⱆ uku (u), Ⱇ fritu (f), Ⱈ heru (h, Cyrillic Х), Ⱉ otu (o, Cyrillic Ѡ), Ⱋ shta (št, Cyrillic Щ), Ⱌ tsi (c, Cyrillic Ц), Ⱍ chrivi (č), Ⱎ sha (š).

Then come the letters for sounds Old Church Slavonic had and most Slavic languages later lost: Ⱏ yeru and Ⱐ yeri, the hard and soft signs; Ⱑ yati, the vowel yat (ě); Ⱓ yu (ju); and the nasal vowels Ⱔ small yus (ę), Ⱗ iotated small yus (ję), Ⱘ big yus (ǫ) and Ⱙ iotated big yus (jǫ). Ⱚ fita (th) and Ⱛ izhitsa (y, v) were kept for spelling Greek names, like θ and υ in Cyrillic Ѳ and Ѵ. Ⱒ spidery ha is attested in a single word, hlŭmŭ 'hill', and Ⱊ pe appears in old alphabet lists but hardly ever in text, so its sound is uncertain.

The letter names are words, and read in order they form a memory sentence: azŭ buky vědě glagoli dobro…, roughly 'I know the letters; speak well…'. The same names were later carried over to Cyrillic, which is why the Russian Alphabet, Ukrainian Alphabet, Bulgarian Alphabet and Serbian Cyrillic Alphabet collections share them. Glagolitic manuscripts had no capital and small letters; Unicode encodes both because modern Croatian printing and scholarly editions developed a two-case use.

Who created the Glagolitic alphabet, and why it gave way to Cyrillic

In 862 the prince of Great Moravia asked Byzantium for teachers who could preach to the Slavs in their own language. Constantine, a scholar from Thessalonica later known as Saint Cyril, designed an alphabet fitted exactly to Slavic sounds and, with his brother Methodius, translated the Gospels and the liturgy into the language now called Old Church Slavonic. The mission worked in Moravia from 863 to 885; after Methodius died, his disciples were expelled and carried the script south to the First Bulgarian Empire, where Saint Clement's school at Ohrid became its great centre.

Around the same time the school at Preslav produced a second alphabet modelled on Greek uncial letters, which took Cyril's name: Cyrillic. It was easier to write and closer to the Greek that Bulgarian officials already knew, so in Bulgaria, Serbia and Kievan Rus' Cyrillic had replaced Glagolitic by about the 12th century. Twenty-four of the Glagolitic letters probably came from Greek cursive minuscule; the sources of the rest, letters like Ⰶ, Ⱋ and Ⱎ for sounds Greek lacks, are still argued over, with Hebrew, Samaritan, Coptic and Armenian all proposed.

The name is Croatian: glagoljica, from Old Church Slavonic glagolŭ 'word, utterance', and it is thought to have arisen in Croatia around the 14th century for the clergy who sang the Slavonic liturgy. In Cyril's own time the letters had no special name at all, and they were simply the Slavic letters.

Round, angular and Croatian Glagolitic

The original letters are round, built from circles and loops, and this Round Glagolitic is what the Bulgarian and Macedonian manuscripts of the 10th and 11th centuries use (the Codex Zographensis and Codex Assemanius, for example). Along the Adriatic the shapes were squared off into Angular Glagolitic, a tall, boxy style that fits stone carving and became the Croatian script from about the 12th century. Most fonts, including the ones that render this page, draw the round forms; a Croatian-style font turns the same code points into the angular letters.

Croatia used Glagolitic longer than anyone. The Baška tablet from the island of Krk, dated to about 1100, records a land grant by King Zvonimir and is the founding monument of Croatian literacy. Hrvoje's Missal (1404) is its finest illuminated book, and the Missale Romanum Glagolitice of 1483 was the first printed Croatian book, set in angular Glagolitic type. Priests in Istria and Dalmatia kept Glagolitic church books into the 19th century, the last entry in the Omišalj baptismal register dates from 1817, and a Glagolitic Mass in Church Slavonic survived in a few parishes into the 20th century. The four Croatian letters in the last group, Ⱜ shtapic, Ⱝ trokutasti a, Ⱞ latinate myslite and Ⱟ caudate chrivi, exist only in this angular tradition.

Today the script is a national emblem in Croatia: it is carved on the 1, 2 and 5 euro cent coins the country issued in 2023 (the 5 cent coin shows a ligature of Ⱈ and Ⱃ), appears on souvenirs and tattoos from Krk and Istria, and is taught in heritage courses. Players know it from The Witcher games, where in-world signs and books are written in Glagolitic letters. Leoš Janáček's Glagolitic Mass of 1926 is named after the script because it is sung in Old Church Slavonic, though the score itself uses the Latin alphabet.

Glagolitic numbers: Ⰰ is 1, Ⰱ is 2, Ⱍ is 1000

Like Greek and Cyrillic, Glagolitic had no separate digits; letters carried number values. The difference is that Glagolitic values follow the alphabet's own order: Ⰰ 1, Ⰱ 2, Ⰲ 3, Ⰳ 4, Ⰴ 5, Ⰵ 6, Ⰶ 7, Ⰷ 8, Ⰸ 9, then Ⰹ 10, Ⰻ 20, Ⰼ 30, Ⰽ 40, Ⰾ 50, Ⰿ 60, Ⱀ 70, Ⱁ 80, Ⱂ 90, and Ⱃ 100, Ⱄ 200, Ⱅ 300, Ⱆ 400, Ⱇ 500, Ⱈ 600, Ⱉ 700, Ⱋ 800, Ⱌ 900, Ⱍ 1000. Cyrillic numerals instead copy the Greek values, so Cyrillic Б, Ж and Ш have no number at all while their Glagolitic twins do.

A number was set off with dots or a titlo stroke above it so it could not be read as a word, and the units were written before the tens in 11 to 19, just as Slavic languages say them (jedin na desęte, 'one on ten'). Values above 1000 are reconstructed and disputed. There are no separate Glagolitic numeral characters in Unicode; a number is just these letters, with U+0483 combining titlo over them if you want the mark.

How to type Glagolitic letters, fonts and Unicode

Tap any letter above to copy it. The Glagolitic block (U+2C00 to U+2C5F) joined Unicode in version 4.1 in March 2005 with 94 letters; Ⱟ ⱟ caudate chrivi filled the last two slots in version 14.0 (2021). The Glagolitic Supplement (U+1E000 to U+1E02A, Unicode 9.0, 2016) holds 38 combining letters, 𞀀 𞀁 𞀂 and so on, which sit above a base letter the way medieval scribes wrote a small letter over the line to abbreviate a word. Use them only after a base letter, never on their own in running text.

Font support is the main hurdle. Windows 10 and 11 ship Segoe UI Historic, which covers the block, and the free Noto Sans Glagolitic from Google covers both blocks. Most phones, macOS and Linux desktops show empty boxes unless a Glagolitic font is installed, so a tattoo or a design should be checked in a real font and not in a chat window. Croatian-style angular fonts exist too; look for one that says angular or Croatian Glagolitic.

There is no standard Glagolitic keyboard layout. In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 2C00 Alt+X gives Ⰰ. Online 'Glagolitic translators' are transliterators: they swap each Latin or Cyrillic letter for its Glagolitic counterpart, which works well for names and short words. Write h as Ⱈ, c as Ⱌ, č as Ⱍ, š as Ⱎ, ž as Ⰶ, and j or i as Ⰻ; there is no letter for Latin x, q or w.