The Russian Alphabet

Cyrillic is the part of Russian that frightens people off and the part that takes the least time. Thirty-three letters, most of them regular: an afternoon is enough to sound words out, and a week of reading aloud badly makes the decoding fluent. The hard part of Russian pronunciation is not the letters at all; it is the stress, which the spelling does not show, and it gets its own section below.

All thirty-three letters

Each letter with its Russian name, its sound in IPA, the Latin spelling this site uses, and an example. The underlined examples are words from the course and link to their pages.

The Latin column is a typing key, not a pronunciation guide. It is the spelling our answer boxes accept and the one the site uses wherever it writes Russian in Latin letters. It writes е as e, so е́сли comes out as esli even though it is said "yesli", and it writes nothing at all for the two signs, because they have no sound to type.

The alphabet is easier met as four groups than as one undifferentiated wall.

Group one: the ones you already know

А, К, М, О and Т look like Latin letters and sound like them too. Е looks like E and says ye at the start of a word. That is a free head start on a sixth of the alphabet, with one catch: О only sounds like o when it carries the stress, which is the whole subject of the stress section below.

Group two: the false friends

These are the ones that catch everybody, and they are worth learning first precisely because they will mislead you otherwise:

• В looks like B and says v: вот.
• Н looks like H and says n: нет.
• Р looks like P and says a rolled r: раз.
• С looks like C and says s: спаси́бо.
• Х looks like X and says the ch in loch: хорошо́.
• У looks like Y and says oo: уже́.

Six letters, and they account for most beginner misreadings. PECTOPAH on a Moscow shopfront is not a word you have to learn; it is РЕСТОРАН, restaurant, read as if it were English. Learn these six deliberately and the rest of the alphabet gives you very little trouble. Two more are worth a glance while you are here: И is a mirrored N that says ee, and Я is a mirrored R that says ya.

Group three: the Greek borrowings

If you have met Greek letters in maths or science, these five will already be familiar in shape if not always in name: Г is gamma, Д is delta, Л is lambda, П is pi and Ф is phi. Russian took its alphabet from Greek by way of Old Church Slavonic, and the family resemblance is still visible. It also explains three of the false friends: В, Р and Х are Greek beta, rho and chi, and they kept their Greek sounds while the Latin alphabet gave the same shapes different jobs.

The rest: new shapes and vowel pairs

What is left is genuinely new. Ж, Ш, Щ, Ч and Ц are consonants English spells with two or more letters (zh, sh, shch, ch, ts), which is why their Latin spellings are long. Ж, Ш and Ц are always hard, so жи is said zhy and ши shy; Ч and Щ are always soft. Щ is a long soft sh, as in a slow fresh sheep; shch is only its spelling. Й is a short y, the one in boy. Ы has no English equivalent: an i said with the tongue pulled back.

The vowels come in pairs, and seeing the pairs saves learning ten letters separately:

The soft vowel is how Russian spells a soft consonant without inventing a new letter for each one: да and дя share a д, but only one of them is said with the tongue raised.

Group four: the two that make no sound

Ь, the soft sign, is not pronounced. It softens (palatalises) the consonant in front of it, which means the tongue moves up towards the position for a y while the consonant is being made. It is the difference between мат, checkmate, and мать, mother, and between брат, brother, and брать, to take. You will see it at the end of день, знать and most verbs in the course.

Ъ, the hard sign, is rarer and does the opposite job: it stops a soft vowel from softening the consonant before it, so the y of the vowel is heard separately. съесть, to eat up, is said s-yest, with a y you can hear; сесть, to sit down, has no ъ and no separate y, just a soft s.

Palatalisation is a real distinction in Russian and it separates words. It is one of the hardest things in Russian pronunciation for English speakers.

Stress, and why learner texts mark it

Here is the part the alphabet does not tell you. Every Russian word of more than one syllable has one stressed syllable, it can fall anywhere, it can move when the word changes form, and the spelling does not show it. It matters far more than in English, because Russian vowels change their sound when they lose the stress.

• Unstressed о is not an o. Just before the stress it is ɐ, close to the u in cup; further away it shrinks to ə, the a in about. хорошо́ has three о's and only the last one sounds like o: xərɐˈʂo. говори́ть is ɡəvɐˈrʲitʲ. The same happens to unstressed а.
• Unstressed е and я both drift towards ɪ, the i in bit: тепе́рь is tʲɪˈpʲerʲ, себя́ is sʲɪˈbʲa. At the end of a word я goes all the way to ə: вре́мя is ˈvrʲemʲə.
• Get the stress wrong and every vowel in the word comes out wrong with it. That is why a Russian listener finds a misplaced stress harder to follow than a mispronounced consonant.

Russian writers do not mark stress outside dictionaries and children's books; a native reader already knows it. Learner materials do, with an acute accent over the stressed vowel: говори́ть. The mark is not part of the spelling and you should not write it in real text, but you should read it every time you see it.

This site marks it for you: on every Russian headword and in every example sentence and story. Words of one syllable are left bare because there is nowhere else for the stress to go, and ё needs no mark because it is always stressed.

Where the spelling and the sound part company

Four rules cover the gaps you will hear in your first few dozen words:

• Voiced consonants go voiceless at the end of a word and before a voiceless consonant: раз is ras, хлеб is xlʲep, and вчера́ starts with an f sound.
• что is said shto. It is one of the commonest words in the language, so the exception comes up constantly.
• -тся and -ться are both said tsa: нра́вится ends like nravitsa.
• In the endings -ого́ and -его́ the г is said v: его́ is said yevo, and сего́дня, today (сего + дня, of this day), keeps the same v: sʲɪˈvodʲnʲə.

The Latin column stays spelling-based through all of this. Type chto and ego, not shto and yevo: the boxes accept the spelling, not the sound, because the spelling is what you will read.

Test yourself

Ten questions: a letter to read into Latin, or a Latin spelling to find in Cyrillic. The false friends come up more often than the rest, because that is where the mistakes are.

You never have to type it here

Almost nobody has a Russian keyboard layout installed, so demanding Cyrillic input would test your keyboard rather than your Russian.

Every typed answer on this site accepts Latin transliteration as well as Cyrillic, using the Latin column in the table above. Writing spasibo is as correct as writing спасибо, and where we show a text box we say so on the box. The reading comes first; the typing can wait until you have a layout and a reason.