Russian alphabet
The Russian alphabet (ру́сский алфави́т, russkiy alfavit, or ру́сская а́збука, russkaya azbuka, more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, Old Slavonic. Initially an old variant of the Bulgarian alphabet, it became used in the Kievan Rusʹ since the 10th century to write what would become the modern Russian language.
| Russian Cyrillic alphabet Русская кириллическая азбука | |
|---|---|
| Script type | |
Time period | 10th century (Old East Slavic) to present; modern orthography: 1918 |
| Languages | Russian |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Egyptian hieroglyphs
|
Child systems | Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Cyrl (220), Cyrillic |
| Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Cyrillic |
| subset of Cyrillic (U+0400...U+04FF) | |
The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: twenty consonants (⟨б⟩, ⟨в⟩, ⟨г⟩, ⟨д⟩, ⟨ж⟩, ⟨з⟩, ⟨к⟩, ⟨л⟩, ⟨м⟩, ⟨н⟩, ⟨п⟩, ⟨р⟩, ⟨с⟩, ⟨т⟩, ⟨ф⟩, ⟨х⟩, ⟨ц⟩, ⟨ч⟩, ⟨ш⟩, ⟨щ⟩), ten vowels (⟨а⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨ё⟩, ⟨и⟩, ⟨о⟩, ⟨у⟩, ⟨ы⟩, ⟨э⟩, ⟨ю⟩, ⟨я⟩), a semivowel / consonant (⟨й⟩), and two modifier letters or "signs" (⟨ъ⟩, ⟨ь⟩) that alter pronunciation of a preceding consonant or a following vowel.