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Russian distinguishes hard (unpalatalized or plain) and soft (palatalized) consonants (both phonetically and orthographically). Soft consonants, most of which are denoted by a superscript ʲ , are pronounced with the body of the tongue raised toward the hard palate , like the articulation of the y sound in yes .
The exact pronunciation of the vowel sound of я depends also on the following sound by allophony in the Slavic languages. In Russian, before a soft consonant, it is [æ], like in the English "cat". If a hard consonant follows я or none, the result is an open vowel, usually . This difference does not exist in the other Cyrillic languages.
It commonly represents the voiced retroflex sibilant /ʐ/ or voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/, like the pronunciation of the s in "measure". It is also often used with D to approximate the sound in English of the Latin letter J with a ДЖ combination. Zhe is romanized as zh , j or ž .
The Russian alphabet (ру́сский алфави́т, russkiy alfavit, [a] or ру́сская а́збука, russkaya azbuka, [b] more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language.
It affects the pronunciation of the preceding consonant by giving it a palatal quality or causing it to become a palatal consonant. The soft sign acts as a visual marker to show that the consonant before it is palatalized. For example, in Russian, the soft sign is often used after consonants to indicate palatalization.
This is because the pronunciation of the two letters is significantly different, and Russian ы normally continues Common Slavic *y [ɨ], which was a separate phoneme. The letter щ is conventionally written št in Bulgarian, šč in Russian. This article writes šš' in Russian to reflect the modern pronunciation [ɕɕ].
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.
This spelling rule does not have a great deal of effect on actual Russian pronunciation, because when unstressed, the vowels о and е are weakened to a very weak sound like the schwa. Note that this rule relates to the fact that stressed о after ж, ц, ч, ш and щ is pronounced the same as the always-stressed letter ё after the same ...