Russian alphabet


The Russian alphabet uses letters from the Cyrillic script to write the Russian language. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters.

Table

Consonant letters represent both "soft" and "hard" consonant phonemes. If consonant letters are followed by vowel letters, the soft/hard quality of the consonant depends on whether the vowel is meant to follow "hard" consonants or "soft" consonants ; see [|below]. A soft sign indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant without adding a vowel. However, in modern Russian six consonant phonemes do not have phonemically distinct "soft" and "hard" variants and do not change "softness" in the presence of other letters: are always hard; are always soft. See Russian phonology for details.

Frequency

The frequency of characters in a corpus of written Russian was found to be as follows:
RankLetterFrequencyOther information
1О11.18%
2Е8.75%Foreign words sometimes use Е rather than Э, even if it is pronounced e instead of ye. In addition, Ё is often replaced by Е. This makes Е even more common. For more information, see Vowels.
3А7.64%
4И7.09%
5Н6.78%The most common consonant in the Russian alphabet.
6Т6.09%
7С4.97%
8Л4.96%
9В4.38%
10Р4.23%
11К3.30%
12М3.17%
13Д3.09%
14П2.47%
15Ы2.36%
16У2.22%
17Б2.01%
18Я1.96%
19Ь1.84%
20Г1.72%
21З1.48%
22Ч1.40%
23Й1.21%
24Ж1.01%
25Х0.95%
26Ш0.72%
27Ю0.47%
28Ц0.39%
29Э0.36%Foreign words sometimes use E rather than Э, even if it is pronounced e instead of ye. This makes Э even less common. For more information, see Vowels.
30Щ0.30%
31Ф0.21%The least common consonant in the Russian alphabet.
32Ё0.20%In written Russian, Ё is often replaced by E. For more information, see Vowels.
33Ъ0.02%Ъ used to be a very common letter in the Russian alphabet. This is because before the 1918 reform, any word ending with a non-palatalized consonant was written with a final Ъ - e.g., pre-1918 вотъ vs. post-reform вот. The reform eliminated the use of Ъ in this context, leaving it the least common letter in the Russian alphabet. For more information, see Non-vocalized letters.

Non-vocalized letters

Hard sign

The hard sign acts like a "silent back vowel" that separates a succeeding "soft vowel" from a preceding consonant, invoking implicit iotation of the vowel with a distinct /j/ glide. Today it is used mostly to separate a prefix ending with a hard consonant from the following root. Its original pronunciation, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound, but likely pronounced or. Until the 1918 reform, no written word could end in a consonant: those that end in a consonant in modern orthography then had a final ъ.
While is also a soft vowel, root-initial following a hard consonant is typically pronounced as. This is normally spelled unless this vowel occurs at the beginning of a word, in which case it remains. An alternation between the two letters can be seen with the pair без и́мени and безымя́нный and compound words.

Soft sign

The soft sign in most positions acts like a "silent front vowel" and indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized and the following vowel is iotated. This is important as palatalization is phonemic in Russian. For example, брат contrasts with брать . The original pronunciation of the soft sign, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short fronted reduced vowel but likely pronounced or. There are still some remnants of this ancient reading in modern Russian, e.g. in co-existing versions of the same name, read and written differently, such as Марья and Мария.
When applied after stem-final always-soft or always-hard consonants, the soft sign does not alter pronunciation, but has grammatical significance:
The vowels indicate a preceding palatalized consonant and with the exception of are iotated when written at the beginning of a word or following another vowel. The IPA vowels shown are a guideline only and sometimes are realized as different sounds, particularly when unstressed. However, may be used in words of foreign origin without palatalization, and is often realized as between soft consonants, such as in мяч.
is an old Proto-Slavic close central vowel, thought to have been preserved better in modern Russian than in other Slavic languages. It was originally nasalized in certain positions: камы ; камень . Its written form developed as follows: + → →.
was introduced in 1708 to distinguish the non-iotated/non-palatalizing from the iotated/palatalizing one. The original usage had been for the uniotated, or for the iotated, but had dropped out of use by the sixteenth century. In native Russian words, is found only at the beginnings of words or in compound words. In words that come from foreign languages in which iotated is uncommon or nonexistent, is usually written in the beginning of words and after vowels except , and after and consonants. However, the pronunciation is inconsistent. Many words, especially monosyllables, words ending in and many words where follows,,,, or are pronounced with without palatalization or iotation: секс, проект . But many other words are pronounced with : секта, дебют. Proper names are usually not concerned by the rule ; the use of after consonants is common in East Asian names and in English names with the sounds and, with some exceptions such as Джек or Шепард, since both and are following always hard consonants in cases of же, ше and це, yet in writing usually prevails.
, introduced by Karamzin in 1797 and made official in 1943 by the Soviet Ministry of Education, marks a sound that historically developed from stressed. The written letter is optional; it is formally correct to write for both and. None of the several attempts in the twentieth century to mandate the use of have stuck.

Letters in disuse by 1750

and derived from Greek letters xi and psi, used etymologically though inconsistently in secular writing until the eighteenth century, and more consistently to the present day in Church Slavonic.
is the Greek letter omega, identical in pronunciation to, used in secular writing until the eighteenth century, but to the present day in Church Slavonic, mostly to distinguish inflexional forms otherwise written identically.
corresponded to a more archaic pronunciation, already absent in East Slavic at the start of the historical period, but kept by tradition in certain words until the eighteenth century in secular writing, and in Church Slavonic and Macedonian to the present day.
The yuses and, letters that originally used to stand for nasalized vowels and, had become, according to linguistic reconstruction, irrelevant for East Slavic phonology already at the beginning of the historical period, but were introduced along with the rest of the Cyrillic script. The letters and had largely vanished by the twelfth century. The uniotated continued to be used, etymologically, until the sixteenth century. Thereafter it was restricted to being a dominical letter in the Paschal tables. The seventeenth-century usage of and survives in contemporary Church Slavonic, and the sounds in Polish.
The letter was adapted to represent the iotated in the middle or end of a word; the modern letter is an adaptation of its cursive form of the seventeenth century, enshrined by the typographical reform of 1708.
Until 1708, the iotated was written Iotified A| at the beginning of a word. This distinction between and survives in Church Slavonic.
Although it is usually stated that the letters labelled "fallen into disuse by the eighteenth century" in the table above were eliminated in the typographical reform of 1708, reality is somewhat more complex. The letters were indeed originally omitted from the sample alphabet, printed in a western-style serif font, presented in Peter's edict, along with the letters ,, and , but were reinstated except and under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church in a later variant of the modern typeface. Nonetheless, since 1735 the Russian Academy of Sciences began to use fonts without,, and ; however, was sometimes used again since 1758.

Letters eliminated in 1918

GraphemeNameDescription
іDecimal IIdentical in pronunciation to, was used exclusively immediately in front of other vowels and the and in the word and its derivatives, to distinguish it from the word .
ѣYatOriginally had a distinct sound, but by the middle of the eighteenth century had become identical in pronunciation to in the standard language. Since its elimination in 1918, it has remained a political symbol of the old orthography.
ѳFitaFrom the Greek theta, was identical to in pronunciation, but was used etymologically.
ѵIzhitsaFrom the Greek upsilon, usually identical to in pronunciation, as in Byzantine Greek, was used etymologically for Greek loanwords, like Latin Y ; by 1918, it had become very rare. In spellings of the eighteenth century, it was also used after some vowels, where it has since been replaced with or . For example, a Greek prefix originally spelled is now spelled in most cases and as a component in some compound words.

Treatment of foreign sounds

Because Russian borrows terms from other languages, there are various conventions for sounds not present in Russian.
For example, while Russian has no, there are a number of common words borrowed from languages like English and German that contain such a sound in the original language. In well-established terms, such as галлюцинация , this is written with and pronounced with, while newer terms use, pronounced with, such as хобби .
Similarly, words originally with in their source language are either pronounced with ), as in the name Тельма or, if borrowed early enough, with or, as in the names Фёдор and Матве́й.
For the affricate, which is common in the Asian countries that were parts of the Russian Empire and USSR, the letter combination is used: this is often transliterated into English either as or the Dutch form.

Numeric values

The numerical values correspond to the Greek numerals, with being used for digamma, for koppa, and for sampi. The system was abandoned for secular purposes in 1708, after a transitional period of a century or so; it continues to be used in Church Slavonic, while general Russian texts use Hindu-Arabic numerals and Roman numerals.

Diacritics

Russian spelling uses fewer diacritics than those used for most European languages. The only diacritic, in the proper sense, is the acute accent , which marks stress on a vowel, as it is done in Spanish and Greek. Although Russian word stress is often unpredictable and can fall on different syllables in different forms of the same word, the diacritic is used only in dictionaries, children's books, resources for foreign-language learners, the defining entry in articles on Russian Wikipedia, or on minimal pairs distinguished only by stress. Rarely, it is used to specify the stress in uncommon foreign words and in poems with unusual stress used to fit the meter. Unicode has no code points for the accented letters; they are instead produced by suffixing the unaccented letter with.
The letter is a special variant of the letter, which is not always distinguished in written Russian, but the umlaut-like sign has no other uses. Stress on this letter is never marked, as it is always stressed except in some loanwords.
Unlike the case of, the letter has completely separated from. It has been used since the 16th century except that it was removed in 1708 but reinstated in 1735. Since then, its usage has been mandatory. It was formerly considered a diacriticized letter, but in the 20th century, it came to be considered a separate letter of the Russian alphabet. It was classified as a "semivowel" by 19th- and 20th-century grammarians but since the 1970s, it has been considered a consonant letter.

The Russian Keyboard

The standard Russian keyboard layout for personal computers is as follows:
However, there are several variations of so-called "phonetic keyboards" that are often used by non-Russians, where, as far as is possible, pressing an English letter key will type the Russian letter with a similar sound.

Letter names

Until approximately the year 1900, mnemonic names inherited from Church Slavonic were used for the letters. They are given here in the pre-1918 orthography of the post-1708 civil alphabet.
The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote: "The letters that make up the Slavonic alphabet do not make any sense. Аз, буки, веди, глаголь, добро etc. are separate words, chosen just for their initial sound". However, since the names of the first few letters of the Slavonic alphabet seem to form readable text, attempts have been made to compose meaningful snippets of text from groups of consecutive letters for the rest of the alphabet.
Here is one such attempt to "decode" the message:
In this attempt only lines 1, 2 and 5 somewhat correspond to real meanings of the letters' names, while "translations" in other lines seem to be fabrications or fantasies. For example, "покой" does not mean "the Universe", and "ферт" does not have any meaning in Russian or other Slavic languages. The last line contains only one translatable word – "червь", which, however, was not included in the "translation".