The Ukrainian Alphabet (Українська азбука, Ukrajins′ka azbuka or абетка, abetka in Ukrainian) is used to write Ukrainian, the official language of Ukraine. It is a version of the Cyrillic writing system, developed from the early Cyrillic alphabet at the end of the first millennium.

Ukrainian is sometimes Romanized, or written using the Latin alphabet, for non-Cyrillic readers or transcription systems. See romanization of Ukrainian for details of specific romanization systems.

Letter names and pronunciation

The Ukrainian alphabet is almost phonetic. Two distinct consonant sounds don't have dedicated letters, and are rendered using two letters: дз /ʣ/, and дж /ʤ/.

Also, certain consonants are softened (palatalized) when followed by certain vowels. Any of д, т, з, с, ц, л, н or дз is softened when followed by a "soft" vowel: я, є, і, ї, й, or ю. See iotation.

The soft sign is not considered a letter, but an orthographic symbol, modifying the preceding letter. It indicates the softening of a consonant, when the consonant is not followed by a softening vowel.

The apostrophe indicates that the consonant preceding a soft vowel is not palatalized, when it otherwise would be.

Letter forms and typography

As in other Cyrillic alphabets, hand-written or cursive letters vary somewhat in form from their block-letter, or typeset upright, counterparts, particularly the letters г, д, и, й, and т.

Typographically, the small (lower-case) letters are very similar to small-caps versions of the capitals, although sophisticated faces may have a small-caps font which is different from the lower-case.

A Cyrillic type face (шрифт, šryft) doesn't technically have "roman" or "italic" fonts, since these terms stem from West European history. It has upright (прямий, prjamyj) and cursive (курсивний, kursyvnyj).

Quoted text is surrounded by un-spaced guillemets (angle-quotes), or lower and upper quotation marks.

Reference: Bringhurst, Robert (2002). The Elements of Typographic Style (version 2.5), pp. 262–264. Vancouver, Hartley & Marks. ISBN 0-88179-133-4.

Encoding Ukrainian

There are various character encodings for representing Ukrainian with computers.

ISO 8859-5

ISO 8859-5 encoding is missing the letter ґ.

KOI8-U

KOI8-U stands for Код обміни інформації 8—український, "Code for exchange of information 8—Ukrainian", analogous to "ASCII". KOI8-U is a Ukrainianized version of KOI8-R, which is suitable for Russian only.

Unicode

Ukrainian falls within the Cyrillic (U+0400 to U+04FF) and Cyrillic Supplementary (U+0500 to U+052F) blocks of Unicode. The characters in the range U+0400–U+045F are basically the characters from ISO 8859-5 moved upward by 864 positions.

In the following table, Ukrainian letters have titles indicating their Unicode information and HTML entity. In a visual browser you can hold the mouse pointer over the letter to see this information.

See also

• Writing system
• Alphabet
• Cyrillic alphabet (Кирилиця, Kyrylycja in Ukrainian)
• Glagolitic alphabet (Глаголиця, Hlaholycja in Ukrainian)
• Romanization of Ukrainian—methods of representing Ukrainian using the Latin alphabet.

External links

• The Cyrillic Charset Soup—Roman Czyborra's site contains an exhaustive history of Cyrillic character set encoding schemes (site currently unavailable—archived copy at archive.org).