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Ukrainian Alphabet (Cyrillic)

The letters and characters of Ukrainian 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 24,080,585 people read or write it across 6 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Ukrainian — 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.

Also in the standard set:

How the Ukrainian alphabet works

Ukrainian is written in a 33-letter Cyrillic alphabet, close cousin to Russian's but not the same set: it keeps Є, І, Ї and Ґ, and does without Ы, Э and Ъ entirely. Letters have capital and small forms, and the sounds are written faithfully — Ukrainian spelling follows pronunciation more closely than Russian does, so reading off the page is unusually reliable. The chart gives each letter's sound in its strong form, at the start of a word or stressed.

The letter that catches readers of Russian out is Г: in Ukrainian it is a breathy, voiced h from the throat, and the hard g of go belongs to Ґ — the alphabet's rarest letter, found in a small set of words and names. The vowels И and І divide the territory Russian gives to И and Ы between them: І is the clean ee of machine, И a shorter, more relaxed i. В works two shifts — a v-w between vowels, melting into a soft u at the end of a syllable.

Four letters are the softening crew. Є, Ю and Я each carry a y-glide at the start of a word — ye, yu, ya — but after a consonant they drop the glide and instead soften the consonant before them while sounding plain e, u, a. Ї is the one always-glide letter, a yee that never softens anything. The soft sign Ь does the softening on its own, with no sound, and Ukrainian also writes a hard apostrophe (ʼ) where Russian would use Ъ, to keep a consonant hard before a gliding vowel — it stands in the additional set above.

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 Ukrainian (Cyrillic) is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Ukrainian in the Cyrillic script. The map is zoomed to the region where at least 1% of a country's people read it; neighbouring countries are shown unshaded for context.