XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Cyrillic

While the Cyrillic script, shown in Table 27-13, is most familiar to Western readers from Russian, it’s also used for other Slavic languages, including Serbian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian, and for many non-Slavic languages of the former Soviet Union, such as Azerbaijani, Tuvan, and Ossetian. Indeed, many characters in this block are not actually found in Russian but exist only in other languages written in the Cyrillic script. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, some non-Slavic languages, such as Moldavian and Azerbaijani, are now reverting to Latin-derived scripts.

Table 27-13. The Cyrillic block of Unicode