Ukrainian Alphabet - Alphabet

Alphabet

Note: before the publication of the official Ukrainian Orthography (1990), the alphabetical order ended with ю, я, ь.

The alphabet comprises thirty-three letters, representing thirty-eight phonemes (meaningful units of sound), and an additional sign—the apostrophe. Ukrainian orthography (the rules of writing) is based on the phonemic principle, with one letter generally corresponding to one phoneme. The orthography also has cases where semantic, historical, and morphological principles are applied.

Twenty letters represent consonants (б, г, ґ, д, ж, з, к, л, м, н, п, р, с, т, ф, х, ц, ч, ш, щ), ten vowels (а, е, є, и, і, ї, о, у, ю, я), and two semivowels (й/yot, and в). The soft sign ь has no phonetic value, but indicates softening (palatalization) of a preceding consonant.

Also, certain consonants are palatalized when followed by certain vowels. Any of д, з, л, н, с, т, ц or дз is softened when followed by a "soft" vowel: є, і, ї, ю, я. See iotation. The apostrophe negates palatalization in places where it would be applied by normal orthographic rules, like the hard sign in Russian. It is also retained in transliterations from Latin, for example Кот-д’Івуар (Côte d'Ivoire) and О’Тул (O’Toole).

There are other exceptions to the phonemic principle in the alphabet. Some letters represent two phonemes: щ /ʃt͡ʃ/, ї /ji/ or /jɪ/, and є /jɛ/, ю /ju/, я /jɑ/ when they don't palatalize a preceding consonant. The digraphs дз and дж are normally used to represent single affricates /d͡z/ and /d͡ʒ/. Palatalization of consonants before е, у, а is indicated by writing the corresponding letter є, ю, я instead (but palatalization before і is usually not indicated).

Compared to other Cyrillic alphabets, the modern Ukrainian alphabet has most in common with those of the other East Slavic languages, Belarusian, Russian, and Rusyn. It has retained both the early Cyrillic i (i) and izhe (и) to represent related sounds /i/ and /ɪ/, as well as the two historical forms e (е) and ye (є). Unique letters are ge (ґ)—used for the less-common velar plosive /ɡ/ sound, since in Ukrainian (similar, although not exactly, to Dutch g) the common Slavic г represents a glottal fricative /ɦ/—and yi (ї) /ji/ or /jɪ/. The apostrophe is also used in Belarusian, while the same function is served in Russian by the hard sign (ъ)—for example, Russian объект vs. Ukrainian об'єкт, "object".