The Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced /sɪˈrɪlɪk/ also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by a wide variety of Slavic languages—Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian—as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. It has also been used for other languages in the past. Not all letters in the Cyrillic alphabet are used in every language with which it is written.
The alphabet has official status with many organisations, and with the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on January 1, 2007, Cyrillic also became the third official alphabet of the EU.