Ukrainian Alphabet

The Ukrainian alphabet is used to write the Ukrainian language, an Eastern Slavonic language primarily spoken in Ukraine and with over 1 million speakers in Russia and other smaller populations in other countries.

The Ukrainian alphabet is one of the national variations of the Cyrillic script. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was sometimes written in the Latin script. The present alphabet has been used since the 18th century.

The modern Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters, representing 38 phonemes, meaning units of sounds, and an additional sign.

There are 20 consonants, ten vowels, and two semivowels. A semivowel is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel but functions as a boundary between two syllables. In addition, there is one soft sign, ь, which has no meaning when written done but indicates a soft consonant when written after a consonant.