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Russian is written with a modern variant of the Cyrillic script.Russian spelling typically avoids arbitrary digraphs.Except for the use of hard and soft signs, which have no phonetic value in isolation but can follow a consonant letter, no phoneme is ever represented with more than one letter.
Ъ used to be a very common letter in the Russian alphabet. This is because before the 1918 reform, any word ending with a non-palatalized consonant was written with a final Ъ — e.g., pre-1918 вотъ vs. post-reform вот. The reform eliminated the use of Ъ in this context, leaving it the least common letter in the Russian alphabet.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Russian on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Russian in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Russian diphthongs all end in a non-syllabic [i̯], an allophone of /j/ and the only semivowel in Russian. In all contexts other than after a vowel, /j/ is considered an approximant consonant. Phonological descriptions of /j/ may also classify it as a consonant even in the coda. In such descriptions, Russian has no diphthongs.
In the pronunciation of the Russian language, several ways of vowel reduction (and its absence) are distinguished between the standard language and dialects. Russian orthography most often does not reflect vowel reduction, which can confuse foreign-language learners, but some spelling reforms have changed some words.
The Russian spelling alphabet at right (PDF) The Russian spelling alphabet is a spelling alphabet (or "phonetic alphabet") for Russian, i.e. a set of names given to the alphabet letters for the purpose of unambiguous verbal spelling. It is used primarily by the Russian army, navy and the police.
The details vary by author, and depend on which letters are available for the language of the text. For instance, in a work written in Ukrainian, г may be used for (the voiced equivalent of х ), whereas in Russian texts, г is used for . This article follows common Russian usage.
In Russian, the letter has little use in loanwords and orthographic transcriptions of foreign words. A notable exception is the use of ля Russian pronunciation: to transcribe /la/, mostly from Romance languages, Polish, German and Arabic. This makes л to match better than its dark l pronunciation in ла .