The Belarusian alphabet is based on the Cyrillic script and is derived from the alphabet of the Old Church Slavonic language. The alphabet of the Medieval Cyrillics (11th century) included forty-three letters. During the evolution of the Belarusian Alphabet, fifteen letters were dropped, the last four of them going after the introduction of the first official Belarusian grammar in 1918, and four new letters were added, thus producing the modern layout of thirty-two letters. Among the four new letters was letter ⟨ў⟩, proposed by Russian linguist Pyotr Bezsonov in 1870.
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