Russian alphabet

The Russian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Russian language.
The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: twenty consonants, ten vowels, a semivowel / consonant, and two modifier letters or "signs" that alter pronunciation of a preceding consonant or a following vowel.

History

Russian alphabet is derived from the Cyrillic script, which was invented in the 9th century to capture accurately the phonology of the first Slavic literary language, Old Church Slavonic. The early Cyrillic alphabet was adapted to Old East Slavic from Old Church Slavonic and was used in Kievan Rus' from the 10th century onward to write what would become the modern Russian language. The last major reform of Russian orthography took place in 1917–1918.

Letters

Historic letters

Letters eliminated in 1917–18

Letter	Cursive	Italics	Old name	IPA	Common transliteration	Similar Russian letter	Examples	No.	Unicode
Іі			і десятеричное	,,	i	Like и or й	стихотворенія stikhotvoréniya "poems, poem"	10	U+0406 / U+0456
Ѣѣ			ять	,	ě	Like е	Алексѣй Aleksěy Alexey		U+0462 / U+0463
Ѳѳ			ѳита	,, /θ/	f	Like ф	орѳографія orfográfiya "orthography, spelling"	9	U+0472 / U+0473
Ѵѵ			ижица	,	y or í	Usually like и, see below	мѵро myro or míro "chrism "	400	U+0474 / U+0475

і — Identical in pronunciation to, it was used exclusively immediately before other vowels and the and in the word and its derivatives, to distinguish it from the word .
ѣ — Originally had a distinct sound, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, it 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.
ѳ — From the Greek theta, it was identical to in pronunciation, but it was used etymologically.
ѵ — From the Greek upsilon, usually identical to in pronunciation, as in Byzantine Greek, it 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.

Letters eliminated before 1750

corresponded to a more archaic pronunciation, already absent in Slavic languages|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.
and derived from Greek letters xi and psi. It was 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. It was used in secular writing until the eighteenth century, but in the present day in Church Slavonic, it was mostly used to distinguish inflexional forms otherwise written identically.
Two "yuses", "big" and "small", used to stand for nasalized vowels and. According to linguistic reconstruction, both became irrelevant for East Slavic phonology at the beginning of the historical period but were introduced along with the rest of the Cyrillic script. The iotated yuses, 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 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 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.
Although praised by Western scholars and philosophers, it was criticized by clergy and many conservative scholars, who found the new standard too "Russified". Some even went as far as to refer to Peter as the Anti-Christ.

Consonants

Most consonants can 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. 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.

Vowels

The Russian alphabet contains 10 vowel letters. They are grouped into soft and hard vowels. The soft vowels,, either indicate a preceding palatalized consonant, or are iotated in all other cases. 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.

Individual vowels

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: Old Russian камы ; Modern Russian 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 a few words э́тот/э́та/э́то 'this 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 of these borrowed words, especially monosyllables, words ending in and many words where follows,,,, or, are pronounced with without palatalization or iotation: секс, моде́ль, кафе́, прое́кт. But many other words are pronounced with : се́кта, дебю́т.
Proper names are sometimes written with after consonants: Сэм — 'Sam', Мэ́ри — 'Mary', Ма́о Цзэду́н — 'Mao Zedong'; 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 and Ше́ннон, since both and, in cases of же, ше and це, follow consonants that are always hard, yet usually prevails in writing. However, English names with the sounds, and after consonants are normally spelled with in Russian: Бе́тти — 'Betty', Пи́тер — 'Peter', Лейк-Плэ́сид — 'Lake Placid'. Pronunciation mostly remains unpalatalized, so Пи́тер — Russian rendering of the English name 'Peter' is pronounced differently from Пи́тер — is a colloquial Russian name of Saint Petersburg.
, 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.

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 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, 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 then had a final.
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 feminine marker for singular nouns in the nominative and accusative; e.g., тушь cf. туш — both pronounced ;
the imperative mood for some verbs;
the infinitives of some verbs ;
the second person for non-past verbs ; and
some adverbs and particles.

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 part of the Russian Empire and the 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 Indo-Arabic numerals and Roman numerals.

Diacritics

The Cyrillic alphabet and Russian spelling generally employ fewer diacritics than those used in other European languages written with the Latin alphabet. 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 accent 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 also used to specify the stress in uncommon foreign words, and in poems with unusual stress used to fit the meter.
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 with a diacritic, as it is always stressed.
Both and the letter have completely separated from and. has been used since the 16th century. 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.

Frequency

The frequency of characters in a corpus of written Russian was found to be as follows:

Rank	Letter	Frequency	Other information	English comparison
1		11.18%		By comparison, 'e' in English appears about 13% in texts.
2		8.75%	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.	'T' appears about 9.1%
3		7.64%		'A' appears about 8.2%
4		7.09%		'O' appears about 7.5%
5	Н	6.78%	The most common consonant in the Russian alphabet.	'I' appears about 7%
6	Т	6.09%
7	С	4.97%
8	Л	4.96%
9	В	4.38%
10	Р	4.23%
11	К	3.30%
12	М	3.17%
13	Д	3.09%
14	П	2.47%
15		2.36%
16		2.22%
17	Б	2.01%
18		1.96%
19	Ь	1.84%
20	Г	1.72%
21	З	1.48%
22	Ч	1.40%
23	Й	1.21%
24	Ж	1.01%
25	Х	0.95%
26	Ш	0.72%
27		0.47%
28	Ц	0.39%
29		0.36%	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.	K : 0.77%
30	Щ	0.30%		J : 0.15%
31	Ф	0.21%	The least common consonant in the Russian alphabet.	X : 0.15%
32		0.20%	In written Russian, is often replaced by.	Q : 0.095%
33	Ъ	0.02%	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.	'Z' : 0.074%

Keyboard layout

Microsoft Windows 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 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 don't represent a meaning at all. Аз, буки, веди, глаголь, добро etc. are individual 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.