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Russian alphabet

Russian Cyrillic alphabet
Русская кириллическая азбука
Script type
Time period
10th century (Old East Slavic) to present; modern orthography: 1918 to present
LanguagesRussian
Related scripts
Parent systems
Child systems
Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet
ISO 15924
ISO 15924Cyrl (220), ​Cyrillic
Unicode
Unicode alias
Cyrillic
subset of Cyrillic (U+0400...U+04FF)
 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

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.

  1. ^ Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21.
  2. ^ Crampton, R. J.; Crampton, B. J. (12 March 1987). A Short History of Modern Bulgaria. CUP Archive. ISBN 978-0-521-27323-7.


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