The Russian alphabet (ру́сский алфави́т, russkiy alfavit, or ру́сская а́збука, russkaya azbuka, more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th … See more

Letters eliminated in 1917–18
• і — Identical in pronunciation to ⟨и⟩, was used exclusively immediately before other vowels and the ⟨й⟩ (" See more

Hard sign
The hard sign (⟨ъ⟩) acts like a "silent back vowel" that separates a succeeding "soft vowel" (⟨е, ё, ю, я⟩, … See more

The numerical values correspond to the Greek numerals, with ⟨ѕ⟩ being used for digamma, ⟨ч⟩ for koppa, and ⟨ц⟩ for sampi. The system was … See more

Most consonants can represent both "soft" (palatalized, represented in the IPA with a ⟨ʲ⟩) and "hard" consonant phonemes. If consonant letters are followed by vowel letters, the soft/hard … See more

Because Russian borrows terms from other languages, there are various conventions for sounds not present in Russian.
For example, while Russian has no [h], there are a number of common words (particularly proper … See more

The Cyrillic alphabet and Russian spelling generally employ fewer diacritics than those used in other European languages written with the Latin … See more