Home / Languages / Russian (Cyrillic)

Russian Alphabet (Cyrillic)

The letters and characters of Russian written in the Cyrillic script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 201,151,469 people read or write it across 24 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Russian — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page. The Fonts column counts how many fonts include each letter, in the same order as the letters and codepoints; an accented form under a letter gets its own codepoint and count line beneath it.

How the Russian alphabet works

Russian is written from left to right in the Cyrillic alphabet: 33 letters — 20 consonants, 10 vowel letters, one half-vowel (Й) and two signs that carry no sound of their own. Every letter has a capital and a small form. The printed forms in the chart are the ones used in books and on screens; Russian handwriting gives several letters quite different shapes.

The ten vowel letters work as five hard–soft pairs: А–Я, Э–Е, Ы–И, О–Ё, У–Ю. A vowel from the soft half of a pair softens the consonant in front of it, adding a trace of y to it; at the start of a word, or after another vowel, the soft vowels are read ya, ye, i, yo and yu. The two signs steer the same system from the other side. The soft sign (Ь) says nothing itself but softens the consonant before it; the hard sign (Ъ) does the opposite, keeping its consonant hard and putting a small break between it and the vowel that follows. The vowel Ы has no English counterpart at all — a deep i made at the back of the mouth.

The traps for English readers are the letters borrowed in shape but not in sound: В is v, Н is n, Р is r, С is s and Х is the ch of loch. Three consonants — Ж, Ш and Ц — are always hard, and three — Й, Ч and Щ — always soft, whatever vowel letter follows them. One further reading rule explains many surprises: an unstressed О is not given its full o value but drifts toward a, so in longer words the sound and the spelling sit a little apart.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Russian (Cyrillic) is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Russian in the Cyrillic script.