Russian alphabet
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.However, ⟨е⟩ may be used in words of foreign origin without palatalization (/e/), and ⟨я⟩ is often realized as [æ] between soft consonants, such as in мяч ('toy ball').⟨ы⟩ is an old Proto-Slavic close central vowel, thought to have been preserved better in modern Russian than in other Slavic languages.⟨ё⟩, introduced by Karamzin in 1797 and made official in 1943 by the Soviet Ministry of Education,[13] marks a /jo/ sound that historically developed from stressed /je/.Its original pronunciation, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short middle schwa-like sound, likely pronounced [ə] or [ɯ].The original pronunciation of the soft sign, lost by 1400 at the latest, was that of a very short fronted reduced vowel /ĭ/ but likely pronounced [ɪ] or [jɪ].[14] When applied after stem-final always-soft (ч, щ, but not й) or always-hard (ж, ш, but not ц) consonants, the soft sign does not alter pronunciation, but has grammatical significance:[15] Because Russian borrows terms from other languages, there are various conventions for sounds not present in Russian.[17] For the [d͡ʒ] affricate, which is common in the Asian countries that were part of the Russian Empire and the USSR, the letter combination ⟨дж⟩ is used: this is often transliterated into English either as ⟨dzh⟩ or the Dutch form ⟨dj⟩.Although Russian word stress is often unpredictable and can fall on different syllables in different forms of the same word, the diacritic accent is used only in dictionaries, children's books, resources for foreign-language learners, the defining entry (in bold) in articles on Russian Wikipedia, or on minimal pairs distinguished only by stress (for instance, за́мок 'castle' vs. замо́к 'lock').The frequency of characters in a corpus of written Russian was found to be as follows:[18] Microsoft Windows keyboard layout for personal computers is as follows: However, there are several variations of so-called "phonetic keyboards" that are often used by non-Russians, where pressing an English letter key will type the Russian letter with a similar sound (A → А, S → С, D → Д, F → Ф, etc.).The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote: "The [names of the] letters that make up the Slavonic alphabet don't represent a meaning at all.
Historical evolution of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, until the 19th century
Alphabetmodern orthographyRussianEgyptian hieroglyphsPhoenician alphabetGreek alphabetGlagolitic alphabetEarly Cyrillic alphabetMongolian Cyrillic alphabetISO 15924UnicodeUnicode rangeCyrillic (U+0400...U+04FF)phonetic transcriptionsInternational Phonetic AlphabetRussian languageCyrillic scriptSlavicliterary languageOld SlavonicBulgarian alphabetKievan Rus'consonantsvowelssemivowelmodifier lettersCursivehedgehogrolled rpalatalizationconsonantpalatalizeslambdaShort Ihomonymselimination in 1918upsilonByzantine GreekEast SlavicChurch SlavonicMacedoniannasalizeddominical letterPaschalPolishtypographical reform of 1708⟨ꙗ⟩Russian Orthodox ChurchRussian Academy of SciencesAnti-ChristLomonosovRussian phonologypalatalizedpalatalized consonantProto-SlavichypercorrectionSaint PetersburgKaramzinSoviet Ministry of Educationthe 1918 reformEnglishGermanThelmaTheodoreMatthewaffricateRussian EmpireGreek numeralsdigammaRoman numeralsdiacriticsacute accentstresscode pointsRussian Wikipediaminimal pairsumlaut-like signcorpusJCUKENkeyboard layoutmnemonicAlexander PushkinComputer russificationCyrillic alphabetsUkrainian Latin alphabetMontenegrin alphabetList of Cyrillic digraphs and trigraphsReforms of Russian orthographyRomanization of RussianRussian BrailleRussian cursiveRussian manual alphabetRussian Morse codeRussian orthographyScientific transliteration of CyrillicSerbian Cyrillic alphabetYoficatorUshakov, DmitryWayback MachineHalle, MorrisCanadaHistoryOld Church SlavonicOld East SlavicIn UkraineRussificationOrthographySpelling rulesReformsRomanization (transliteration)Morse codeBrailleGrammarDeclensionReduplicationPhonologyVowel reductionLiteraturePushkin HouseFormalismScience fiction and fantasyDialectsNorthernCentralMoscowTrasianka