Russian alphabet The Russian alphabet uses letters from the
Cyrillic script. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters.
Alphabet The Russian alphabet is as follows:
The consonant letters represent both as "soft" (palatalized, represented in the IPA with
a 〈ʲ〉) and "hard" consonant phonemes. If a consonant letter is followed by a vowel
letter, then the soft/hard quality of the consonant depends on whether the vowel is
meant to follow "hard" consonants 〈а, о, э, у, ы〉 or "soft" ones 〈я, ё, е,
ю, и〉; see below. A handful of consonant phonemes do not have phonemically distinct
"soft" and "hard" variants. See Russian phonology for details.
Frequency The frequency of letters in the Russian Alphabet
is as follows: Non-vocalized letters
hard sign (〈ъ〉), when put after a consonant, acts like a "silent back vowel" that separates
a succeeding iotated vowel from the consonant, making that sound with a distinct /j/ glide.
Today it is used mostly to separate a prefix from the following root. Its original pronunciation,
lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound, /ŭ/ but
likely pronounced or. Until the 1918 reform, no written word could end in a consonant:
those that end in a ("hard") consonant in modern orthography had then a final ъ.
soft sign (〈ь〉) acts like a "silent front vowel" and indicates that the preceding
consonant is palatalized. This is important as palatalization is phonemic in Russian.
For example, брат ('brother') contrasts with брать ('to take'). The original
pronunciation of the soft sign, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short fronted
reduced vowel /ĭ/ but likely pronounced or. There are still some remains of this ancient
reading in modern Russian, in the co-existing versions of the same name, read differently,
such as in Марья and Мария (Mary). Vowels
The vowels 〈е, ё, и, ю, я〉 indicate a preceding palatal consonant and with the
exception of 〈и〉 are iotated (pronounced with a preceding /j/) when written at the
beginning of a word or following another vowel (initial 〈и〉 was iotated until the nineteenth
century). The IPA vowels shown are a guideline only and sometimes are realized as different
sounds, particularly when unstressed. However, 〈е〉 may be used in words of foreign origin
without palatalization (/e/), and 〈я〉 is often realized as between soft consonants,
such as in мяч ("toy ball"). 〈ы〉 is an old Common Slavonic tense intermediate
vowel, thought to have been preserved better in modern Russian than in other Slavic languages.
It was originally nasalized in certain positions: камы; камень ("rock"). Its written
form developed as follows: 〈ъ〉 + 〈і〉 → 〈ъı〉 → 〈ы〉.
〈э〉 was introduced in 1708 to distinguish the non-iotated/non-palatalizing /e/ from
the iotated/palatalizing one. The original usage had been 〈е〉 for the uniotated
/e/, 〈ѥ〉 or 〈ѣ〉 for the iotated, but 〈ѥ〉 had dropped out of use by the
sixteenth century. In native Russian words, 〈э〉 is found only at the beginnings of
words or in compound words (e.g. поэтому "therefore" = по + этому). In words
that come from foreign languages in which the use of iotated /e/ in uncommon or non-existing
(such as English, for example), there is currently shallow grammatical basis on whether to use
〈э〉 or 〈е〉, as rules were only established roughly after 1990. During Soviet era the
written use of 〈е〉 was predominant for all foreign words, except for those which
could create confusion by their pronunciation (ex: поэт (poet) and поет (poyot — " sings",
today accepted in formal writing as поёт; although this very example is more likely
to be vestigial to influence of the French language on Russian Imperial elite during
the 19th century). Starting 1990, any one-syllable words with 〈е〉 and words in which 〈е〉
does not occupy the first syllable are predominantly pronounced as /e/: секс (seks — "sex"),
проект (proekt — "project"). Cases otherwise will retain /ʲe/ on their first
syllable: секта (syekta — "sect"), дебют (dyebut — "debut"). Proper names
are usually not concerned by the rule (Сэм — "Sam", Пэмела — "Pamela"), with
some exceptions such as Джек ("Jack") or Шепард ("Shepard"), since both 〈э〉
and 〈е〉 are not palatalized in cases of же ("che") or ше ("she"), yet in writing
〈е〉 usually prevails. 〈ё〉, introduced by Karamzin in 1797 and
made official in 1943 by the Soviet Ministry of Education, marks a /jo/ sound that has
historically developed from /je/ under stress, a process that continues today. The letter
〈ё〉 is optional (in writing, not in pronunciation): it is formally correct to write 〈e〉 for
both /je/ and /jo/. None of the several attempts in the twentieth century to mandate the use
of 〈ё〉 have stuck. Letters in disuse by 1750
〈ѯ〉 and 〈ѱ〉 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. 〈ѡ〉 is the Greek letter omega, identical
in pronunciation to 〈о〉, used in secular writing until the eighteenth century, but
to the present day in Church Slavonic, mostly to distinguish inflexional forms otherwise
written identically. 〈ѕ〉 corresponded to a more archaic /dz/
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 〈ѫ〉 and 〈ѧ〉, letters that originally used to stand for nasalized vowels
/õ/ and /ẽ/, 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 〈ѭ〉 and 〈ѩ〉 had largely
vanished by the twelfth century. The uniotated 〈ѫ〉 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 〈ѫ〉 and 〈ѧ〉 (see next note)
survives in contemporary Church Slavonic, and the sounds (but not the letters) in Polish.
The letter 〈ѧ〉 was adapted to represent the iotated /ja/ 〈я〉 in the middle or
end of a word; the modern letter 〈я〉 is an adaptation of its cursive form of the
seventeenth century, enshrined by the typographical reform of 1708.
Until 1708, the iotated /ja/ was written 〈ıa〉 at the beginning of a word. This distinction
between 〈ѧ〉 and 〈ıa〉 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 modern letter 〈й〉, but were reinstated under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church
in a later variant of the modern typeface. Nonetheless, they fell completely out of use
in secular writing by 1750. Treatment of foreign sounds
Because Russian borrows terms from other languages, there are various conventions in dealing with
sounds not present in Russian. For example, while Russian has no, there are a number of
common words (particularly proper nouns) borrowed from languages like English and German that
contain such a sound in the original language. In well-established terms, such as галлюцинация
('hallucination'), this is written with 〈г〉 and pronounced with /ɡ/ while newer terms
use 〈х〉, pronounced with /x/, such as хобби ('hobby').
Similarly, words originally with in their source language are either pronounced with
/t(ʲ)/), as in the name Тельма ('Thelma') or, if borrowed early enough, with /f(ʲ)/
or /v(ʲ)/, as in the names Фёдор ('Theodore') and Матве́й ('Matthew').
Numeric values The numerical values correspond to the Greek
numerals, with 〈ѕ〉 being used for digamma, 〈ч〉 for koppa, and 〈ц〉 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.
Diacritics Russian spelling uses fewer diacritics than
those used for most European languages. The only diacritic, in the proper sense, is the
acute accent 〈◌́〉 (Russian: знак ударения 'mark of stress'), which
marks stress on a vowel, as it is done in Spanish. Although Russian word stress is often
unpredictable and can fall on different syllables in different forms of the same word, this
diacritic is only used in special cases: in dictionaries, children's books, or language-learning
resources, on minimal pairs distinguished only by stress (for instance, за́мок
'castle' vs. замо́к 'lock'). Rarely, it is used to specify the stress in uncommon
foreign words and in poems where unusual stress is used to fit the meter.
The letter 〈ё〉 is a special variant of the letter 〈е〉, 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 〈ё〉, the letter 〈й〉 has completely separated from 〈и〉. It
is neither considered a vowel, nor even a diacriticized letter.
Keyboard layout The standard Russian keyboard layout for PC
computers is as follows: However, there are several choices of so called
"phonetic keyboards" that one may use on a PC that are often used by non-Russians. For
example, typing an English (Latin) letter on a keyboard will actually type a Russian
letter with a similar sound. See kbd and Russian keyboard layout (wikipedia).
Letter names Until approximately 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 great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote:
"The letters constituting the Slavonic alphabet do not produce any sense. Аз, буки,
веди, глаголь, добро etc. are separate words, chosen just for their
initial sound". But since the names of the first letters of the Slavonic alphabet seem
to form text, attempts were made to compose sensible text from all letters of the alphabet.
Here is one such attempt to "decode" the message: In this attempt words only in two first lines
somewhat correspond to real meanings of the letters' names, while "translations" in other
lines seem to be fabrications or fantasies. For example, "покой" ("rest" or "apartment")
doesn't mean "the Universe", and "ферт" doesn't have any meaning in Russian or other
Slavonic languages (there are no words of Slavonic origin beginning with "f" at all).
The last line contains only one translatable word – "червь" ("worm"), which, however,
was not included in the "translation". Another version of "the message", incorporating
the letters phased out by mid-1750s, reads: