| Four “native” letters | Ґ, Є, І, Ї are distinctively Ukrainian. Ї is unique among all Cyrillic alphabets: only in Ukrainian is it a separate letter, denoting the combination of two sounds [yi]. |
| The banning of Ґ | In 1933 the Soviet authorities removed Ґ from the alphabet as part of a campaign to “unify” spelling. The letter was only restored in 1990, in the spelling revision of the late-perestroika era. |
| Г vs Ґ | Г is a voiced glottal sound [ɦ], as in the Ukrainian “hora” (mountain) — close to the English “h” in “hello”, but voiced. Ґ is a hard plosive [ɡ], as in “ganok” (porch) or the English “g” in “get”. In most other Slavic languages these two sounds have merged into one. |
| The unique Ї | Ї is the only letter in any Cyrillic alphabet that denotes the combination of two sounds [yi]. It appears at the start of a word or after a vowel: “Ukraina”, “Kyiv”, “yiyi” (her), “yizhak” (hedgehog), “yisty” (to eat). |
| И — a special sound | The Ukrainian И is pronounced midway between [i] and [e] (IPA [ɪ]), close to the English “i” in “sit”. It is a sound in its own right, not a variant of “і” — Ukrainian has a separate letter І for the pure [i]. |
| The soft sign (Ь) | It denotes no sound of its own — it merely softens the preceding consonant: “sil” (salt), “den” (day), “uchytel” (teacher). It sits in 31st place in the alphabet but, as a “helper letter”, is counted alongside the rest. |
| The apostrophe | The apostrophe (’) is not a letter, but it is used actively: it separates a hard consonant from an iotated vowel so the vowel does not soften it: “p’yat” (five), “m’yaso” (meat), “z’yizd” (congress), “ob’yekt” (object). Until the 1990s, Soviet publications often replaced it with a hard sign — another consequence of the official spelling restrictions of the time. |
| Origin | The Ukrainian alphabet is a direct descendant of the Cyrillic script created in the 9th century by the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius to translate liturgical books. The original Cyrillic had more than 40 letters; the superfluous ones (such as Ѣ “yat”, Ѫ “yus”, Ы “yery”) gradually fell away, the last of them during the spelling reforms of the 19th–20th centuries. |
| The switch to “new” names | Until the 19th century the letters bore Old Church Slavonic names: “az”, “buky”, “vidi”, “hlahol”… The modern short names “a, be, ve, he” spread in the 19th century as part of a broader movement to bring writing closer to the living language. Today’s official names were fixed by the 1928 spelling code. |
| The iotated letters: Є, Ї, Ю, Я | Four letters, each standing in writing for the pair “y + vowel”: Є = y+e, Ї = y+i, Ю = y+u, Я = y+a. This economy of notation is characteristic specifically of the Slavic Cyrillic alphabets. |
| Й — the “short i” | Its old traditional name is “yot”; the school name is “short i”. For a long time Й was regarded as a variant of І rather than a separate letter; it was established as an independent character only in the 19th century. |
| Щ — one letter, two sounds | Щ denotes the combination of two sounds [shch] — not a single softened sibilant, as one might assume. So “shchuka” (pike) is pronounced [shch-uka], “borshch” [borshch], “vyshchyy” (higher) [vy-shch-yy]. |