Rusyn Alphabet & Letters

The Rusyn alphabet of the standard codified in Slovakia, often called Prešov Rusyn, runs А Б В Г Ґ Д Е Є Ё Ж З І Ї И Ы Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ю Я Ь Ъ: 36 letters, each with a capital and a small form. It is written in Cyrillic, and its letter set, with both Ґ Є І Ї and Ё Ы Ъ, is exactly what makes Rusyn hard to type on a standard keyboard.

Rusyn writes Ґ ґ, Є є, І і and Ї ї, which it shares with Ukrainian, and Ё ё, Ы ы and Ъ ъ, which it shares with Russian. The order is also its own: the four i-like letters stand together, І Ї И Ы, before Й, and the soft and hard signs Ь and Ъ close the alphabet after Я.

Rusyn letters that set it apart: Ы, Ґ, Ї, Є, Ё and Ô

Ы ы is the most visible difference from Ukrainian. Rusyn kept the old back vowel that Ukrainian merged into и, so words are written with ы where a Ukrainian would write и: мы (we), ты (you), добрый (good), был (was). The name of the language in the Slovak standard is русиньскый язык.

Г and Ґ are two different sounds, as in Ukrainian: г is a voiced h, ґ a hard g, found mainly in loanwords such as ґазда (farmer, master of the house). Є and Ї are je and ji, and Ё writes jo or an o after a soft consonant. Ь marks a soft consonant; Ъ is the hard sign.

The standard used in Ukraine, for the Rusyns of Transcarpathia, adds one more letter, Ô ô, an o with a circumflex for a vowel that many Rusyn dialects there pronounce differently from both о and і. Unicode has no precomposed Cyrillic Ô: write a Cyrillic О followed by the combining circumflex ̂ (U+0302). Many websites type the Latin Ô instead, which looks the same but breaks search and spell-checking.

Prešov, Transcarpathian, Lemko and Pannonian Rusyn alphabets

Rusyn has no single standard. Rusyns in Slovakia received a codified literary language on 27 January 1995 in Bratislava, and that is the alphabet shown in the grid. The Rusyns of Transcarpathia in Ukraine write a variety with Ô, and the Lemkos of Poland have their own standard, taught in schools in Poland as the Lemko language.

Pannonian Rusyn, spoken in Vojvodina in Serbia and in eastern Croatia, is the most distinct. Its speakers descend from settlers who came from what is now eastern Slovakia in the 18th century, and their speech is close to East Slovak dialects. The Pannonian Rusyn alphabet has 32 letters, А Б В Г Ґ Д Е Є Ж З И Ї Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ю Я Ь, with no Ё, І, Ы or Ъ; its speakers call the language руски язик. It is one of the six official languages of Vojvodina, and Ruski Krstur is its cultural centre.

How to type Rusyn letters on a keyboard and phone

There is no Rusyn keyboard layout in Windows or macOS, so most people combine two: the Ukrainian layout gives Ґ Є І Ї, the Russian layout gives Ы Ё Ъ, and a quick switch (Win+Space on Windows, Ctrl+Space or the globe key on a Mac) moves between them. Phones work the same way: add a Ukrainian and a Russian keyboard and switch with the globe key.

For a single letter in Microsoft Word, type its code and press Alt+X: 044B for ы, 042B for Ы, 0451 for ё, 0491 for ґ, 0454 for є, 0456 for і, 0457 for ї, 044A for ъ, and 0302 right after о for о̂. On a Mac the Unicode Hex Input source does the same with Option held down. In HTML, ы is ы, ї ї, ґ ґ and є є. Or simply click any letter on this page to copy it.

Where Rusyn is spoken

Rusyn is an East Slavic language of the Carpathian Mountains, where Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania meet. CLDR estimates about 430,000 speakers and assigns the total to Ukraine; Ukraine itself does not recognise Rusyns as a separate nationality and treats their speech as Ukrainian dialects. Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia recognise Rusyn as a minority language; Poland lists Lemko as a protected minority language, and many linguists treat Rusyn as a language in its own right.

Rusyn is closest to Ukrainian, and it shares much vocabulary with Slovak and Polish, its western neighbours. A large diaspora lives in the United States, especially around Pittsburgh, where many families came from Greek Catholic villages in the Carpathians around 1900. For the letters of the neighbouring languages see the Ukrainian, Slovak, Polish, Russian, Belarusian, Serbian and Hungarian collections, and for the countries the Ukraine collection.