Komi Alphabet & Letters

Komi, the Uralic language of the Komi Republic in the far north-east of European Russia, has been written in Cyrillic since the late 1930s. Its alphabet has 35 letters, two of them its own: І і, placed after И, and Ӧ ӧ, placed after О. So Komi alphabetical order runs А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И І Й К Л М Н О Ӧ П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я, and a Komi dictionary puts every word beginning with Ӧ after all the words beginning with О.

Three sounds of Komi are written with two letters: дж and дз, voiced affricates, and тш, the hard ch sound, as in тшак (mushroom). Komi textbooks often list them as letters of their own, after Д and after Т, but on a keyboard they are simply two keys. Plain Ч is the soft ch sound. Letters such as Ф, Х, Ц and Щ turn up mostly in words borrowed from Russian.

This page covers written Komi in its main standard, often called Komi-Zyrian. Komi-Permyak, spoken in Perm Krai to the south, has its own written standard on the same pattern, also with І and Ӧ, so everything needed for it is here too.

What the Komi letters Ӧ and І do

Ӧ ӧ is a very frequent vowel. It is a central vowel said with spread lips, roughly the vowel of English 'bird' without the r. Unlike German ö or the ӧ of Mari, it is not rounded. It is everywhere in the native vocabulary: вӧр (forest), кӧр (reindeer), аттьӧ (thank you), and the greeting чолӧм (hi). Writing О instead turns it into a different word or a misspelling.

І і spells the same vowel as И, but it tells you something about the consonant in front of it. After д, з, л, н, с and т, И makes the consonant soft (palatalized), while І keeps it hard. So the word for sun is шонді, with a hard д, and swapping in и would change how the word is read. Elsewhere Komi writes и as Russian does.

Komi uses Ь a great deal, because soft consonants are part of its sound system: дь, зь, ль, нь, сь and ть are distinct sounds, as in аттьӧ. The other vowel to watch is Ы, frequent in words such as кыв (language, tongue): коми кыв is the Komi language.

How to type Komi letters on a keyboard

Start from a Russian keyboard layout, which Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone all include: it covers every Komi letter except І and Ӧ. A Ukrainian or Belarusian layout has і on a key of its own. For Ӧ, copy it from this page, add a text-replacement shortcut on your phone, or use its Unicode code.

In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 04E6 Ӧ, 04E7 ӧ, 0406 І, 0456 і. On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input layout, hold Option and type the same four digits. In HTML write Ӧ for Ӧ, ӧ for ӧ, І for І and і for і.

Watch the look-alikes. Latin I i and Latin Ö ö look exactly like Cyrillic І і and Ӧ ӧ, but they are different characters, so a word such as шонді typed with a Latin i will not be found by search or accepted by a spell checker. The quotation marks are Alt+0171 « and Alt+0187 » on a Windows number pad, and Option+\ and Option+Shift+\ on a US Mac keyboard.

Where Komi is spoken

The latest CLDR data lists Komi's language population in Russia as 110,000 🇷🇺. Its home is the Komi Republic (Коми Республика), a land of taiga, rivers and the northern Urals, where Komi and Russian are the official languages. The capital is Syktyvkar, Сыктывкар, the 'town on the Sysola'. Komi villages line the Vychegda, the Pechora and the Izhma, and the Izhma Komi in the north are known for their reindeer herding 🦌. Prices are written in rubles, with ₽.

Komi belongs to the Permic branch of the Uralic family, together with Komi-Permyak and Udmurt, its closest relatives. Erzya, Mari, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are more distant cousins. Almost all Komi speakers also speak Russian, and Russian is the language of schooling and most printed text, so the Russian, Udmurt, Mari and Finnish collections are useful neighbours.

The old Komi alphabets: Old Permic and Molodtsov

Komi was one of the first Uralic languages to be written. In 1372 the missionary Stephen of Perm created an alphabet for it, today called Old Permic or Abur, built partly on Greek and Cyrillic letters and partly on old Komi marks. It was used for church texts and inscriptions until Cyrillic gradually took over, in the 16th–17th centuries. Unicode added Old Permic in version 7.0 (2014), in the block U+10350–U+1037F, so its letters, from 𐍐 an and 𐍑 bur onward, can be copied today, though you need a font such as Noto Sans Old Permic to see them.

The second old alphabet is the one Vasily Molodtsov made for Komi, used in the 1920s and early 1930s. It wrote each soft consonant with a single letter of its own, such as Ԉ for today's ль and Ԋ for нь, instead of a letter plus Ь. Komi was then written briefly in Latin letters before the present Cyrillic alphabet with І and Ӧ was adopted. The Molodtsov letters are in Unicode as the 'Komi' letters at the very start of the Cyrillic Supplement block, U+0500 Ԁ to U+050F ԏ.

Is there a Komi Republic flag emoji?

No. Flag emoji are made from two regional indicator letters standing for an ISO country code, so 🇷🇺 is R + U for Russia. Unicode also has tag sequences for regions inside a country, but only England, Scotland and Wales are on the recommended list, so phones draw no flag for the Komi Republic. Its real flag is a horizontal tricolour of blue, green and white, so people often stand in for it with the squares 🟦🟩⬜, or use 🇷🇺 with the words Коми Республика.

The emoji that suit the Komi land best are the spruce 🌲 for the taiga, вӧр, and the deer 🦌 for the reindeer, кӧр, of the northern herders.