Why Western Slavs Rejected Cyrillic

Glagolitic which became Cyrillic are the slavic alphabets, Why then do the western slavs use Latin script instead? The Slavic world is divided between two completely different alphabets and it mostly comes down to who got there first. Around 280 million Slavic speakers write in either the Latin alphabet or Cyrillic, and that dividing line cuts straight through Europe along the old split between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. The Western Slavs, meaning the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Sorbs and Kashubians, never adopted Cyrillic and ended up using Latin because Latin clergy reached them before any Slavic alphabet existed at all. For one brief moment they almost had their own script called Glagolitic, invented in Great Moravia in 863 by the brothers Cyril and Methodius, but it was crushed by 885 before Cyrillic had even been created. Cyrillic was born a generation later in Bulgaria, built by the same disciples who had just been exiled from Moravia, which means the alphabet now tied to Russia and the Orthodox world actually started life in the lands of the people who would never use it. The story runs through the Baptism of Poland in 966 under Mieszko I, the conversion of Vladimir of Rus in 988 and his choice of Constantinople over Rome, the Trilingual Heresy, the Preslav Literary School, and the Latin loanwords like kościół, biskup and krzyż that still sit inside modern Polish today. An alphabet eventually becomes identity, which is exactly why the Russian Empire failed when it tried to force Cyrillic onto Polish schoolbooks after the January Uprising of 1863, and why the same fight is still alive right now in Kazakhstan, Belarus, Mongolia, Serbia and Ukraine. So if you have ever wondered why Poland does not use Cyrillic, how the Latin and Cyrillic divide actually happened, or what the real difference between Glagolitic and Cyrillic even is, this is the full history from the ninth century to the present day. Join the First Domino EU unification movement: https://firstdomino.eu/ https://discord.firstdomino.eu/ Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 0:45 - Why I Learned the Cyrillic Alphabet 1:46 - The Short Answer 2:56 - Creation of Glagolitic By Cyril and Methodius 4:29 - Suppression of Glagolitic By Rome 7:27 - Bulgaria Created Cyrillic 8:51 - Religion Split the Slavic Alphabets 11:10 - The Baptism of Poland in 966 12:26 - Russia Tried to Force Cyrillic on Poland 13:48 - Romanian Uses Latin 14:19 - Turkish Uses Latin 14:42 - Mongolia Distances Away From Cyrillic 15:00 - Balcan Alphabet Mess 15:53 - Russian Modern Suppression of Latin 16:23 - Kazakhstan, Belarus & Ukraine Move Away From Cyrillic 17:02 - Why We Need a European Federation 17:32 - Outro Become a member:    / @polishdane   Socials: Discord:   / discord   Reddit:   / polishdane   Instagram:   / polishdaneyt   Facebook:   / polishdaneyt   Threads: https://www.threads.com/@polishdaneyt Twitter/X: https://x.com/PolishDaneYT BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/polishdane.b... TikTok:   / polishdane_yt   Twitch:   / polishdaneyt   LinkedIn:   / polishdane   YouTube:    / @polishdane   Thanks to OETS_Disc for making one of the thumbnails Sources: https://www.britannica.com/biography/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_M... https://www.ebsco.com/research-starte... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiching https://www.britannica.com/biography/... https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/podzim2017... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svatopl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archbis... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preslav... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_... https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mieszko_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History... https://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/chr... https://christianhistoryinstitute.org... https://russianartandempire.substack.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russifi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russifi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus... https://www.britannica.com/topic/Glag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-c... https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/0... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_... https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1...