ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Early Cyrillic alphabet

Okay kiddo, did you know that long, long ago in a country called Bulgaria, people used a different alphabet than the one we use now? It was called the Cyrillic alphabet.

The Cyrillic alphabet was created by two brothers named Cyril and Methodius, who wanted the people in Bulgaria to be able to read and write in their own language. They made a special alphabet that had letters for all the sounds in the Bulgarian language.

The alphabet they made had some letters that looked like the ones we use now, but some of them looked very different! For example, the letter "A" looked like a triangle, the letter "B" looked like a fancy "H", and the letter "C" looked like a backwards "S" with a line through it.

People in Bulgaria used this Cyrillic alphabet for a long time, and it even spread to other countries like Russia and Serbia. Eventually, the letters were changed a little bit and now we use a newer version of the Cyrillic alphabet in some countries today, but it all started with those brothers who wanted to help people read and write in their own language.