NonCyrillic

NonCyrillic is a descriptive label used to refer to writing systems that do not employ the Cyrillic alphabet. It is not a formal linguistic category but a practical term used in linguistics, typography, and computing to distinguish scripts that are not Cyrillic from those that are.

Examples of nonCyrillic scripts include Latin, Greek, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, the Han Chinese characters, and the syllabaries Kana as well as the Korean Hangul script. Some languages use more than one script; for instance Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin, and Japanese uses Kanji together with Kana.

In computing and digital typography, nonCyrillic serves as a broad category for tasks such as script identification, transliteration, and font selection. The Cyrillic script occupies the Unicode block U+0400 to U+04FF, with additional Cyrillic extensions; all other scripts live in their respective blocks such as Latin, Han, Kana, Devanagari, and others.

Historically, Cyrillic was developed in the 9th century in the First Bulgarian Empire and subsequently spread across many languages. The nonCyrillic category highlights the diversity of global writing systems and the need for cross-script support in multilingual communication, data storage, and information retrieval.