Russian Cyrillic alphabet Русская кириллическая азбука | |
---|---|
Script type | |
Time period | 10th century (Old East Slavic) to present; modern orthography: 1918 to present |
Languages | Russian |
Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Egyptian hieroglyphs[1]
|
Child systems | Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet |
ISO 15924 | |
ISO 15924 | Cyrl (220), Cyrillic |
Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Cyrillic |
subset of Cyrillic (U+0400...U+04FF) | |
The Russian alphabet (ру́сский алфави́т, russkiy alfavit,[a] or ру́сская а́збука, russkaya azbuka,[b] more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language. It is derived from the Cyrillic script, which was modified in the 9th century to capture accurately the phonology of the first Slavic literary language, Old Slavonic. Initially an old variant of the Bulgarian alphabet,[2] it was used in Kievan Rus' from the 10th century onward to write what would become the modern Russian language.
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.
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