Ukrainian Alphabet & Letters

The Ukrainian alphabet in order is А Б В Г Ґ Д Е Є Ж З И І Ї Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ь Ю Я: 33 letters, each with a capital and a small form. It is a Cyrillic alphabet, so most letters look like their Russian, Belarusian or Bulgarian cousins, but Ukrainian gives several of them sounds of its own, and its spelling follows pronunciation closely: a word is mostly read the way it is written.

The most surprising letter for learners is Г г. In Ukrainian it is not a hard g but a voiced, breathy h, which is why Ukrainian names are romanized with h: Гуцул is Hutsul, гора (mountain) is hora, Гоголь is Hohol. И и is a short sound close to the i in English bit, while І і is a full [i] as in machine, and the two keep words apart: кит (whale) and кіт (cat). Е е is a plain e as in bed, without the y-glide it has in Russian.

Щ щ is pronounced as a full sh + ch, as in борщ (borshch) and що (what). Ь ь, the soft sign, has no sound of its own; it softens the consonant before it, as in сіль (salt) and день (day). No Ukrainian word begins with it, so the capital Ь only appears in text set all in capitals.

Ґ, Є, І, Ї: the letters of Ukrainian

Four letters are the signature of the Ukrainian alphabet: seeing any of them in a text tells you it is Ukrainian. Ї ї, the i with two dots, is always pronounced [ji], like English yee: Україна (Ukraine), Київ (Kyiv), їжак (hedgehog), її (her). Besides Ukrainian, only the closely related Rusyn uses it as a letter. Є є is [je], ye: Європа (Europe), моє (my), є (there is). І і, the dotted i, Ukrainian shares with Belarusian and Rusyn.

Ґ ґ is the hard g of English go. It is rare, found in words like ґанок (porch), ґудзик (button), ґава (crow) and ґрунт (soil), and it can change a word: гніт is oppression, ґніт the wick of a candle. Soviet spelling removed Ґ in 1933 and folded it into Г; it came back with the spelling rules of 1990, so older texts and some software still do without it.

The Ukrainian apostrophe: сімʼя, пʼять, обʼєкт

The apostrophe is not counted as a letter, but you cannot write Ukrainian without it. It shows that a consonant stays hard and the following я, ю, є or ї is said with its own y sound: мʼясо (meat), пʼять (five), сімʼя (family), памʼять (memory), пірʼя (feathers). It is written after б, п, в, м, ф unless another root consonant (other than р) precedes them; after р, except when ря, рю or рє represent a soft р plus the following vowel; and after prefixes or first parts of compounds ending in a hard consonant: зʼїзд (congress), обʼєкт (object), розʼяснити (to explain).

Three different characters are used for it. Keyboards type the straight ' (U+0027), books and newspapers print the curly ’ (U+2019), and the letter apostrophe ʼ (U+02BC) is the one in the Unicode CLDR list of Ukrainian letters: because Unicode classifies ʼ as a modifier letter, so default word-boundary rules keep сімʼя together; they also keep ’ inside a word when it appears between letters. All three read correctly, but ʼ is the safest choice in names, usernames and data.

How to type Ukrainian letters: keyboard layout, codes and phones

Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iPhone all ship a Ukrainian keyboard layout; on Windows add it under Settings › Time & language › Language & region. It is a ЙЦУКЕН layout, with і, ї and є on the keys that hold ы, ъ and э in the Russian layout. In the Windows Ukrainian (Enhanced) layout and the standard Linux one, ґ has its own key (the backslash key) and the apostrophe sits on the key left of 1; Shift+3 types №.

For a single letter in Microsoft Word, type its code and press Alt+X: 0491 for ґ (0490 for Ґ), 0454 for є (0404 Є), 0456 for і (0406 І), 0457 for ї (0407 Ї), 02BC for the apostrophe ʼ and 20B4 for ₴. On a Mac with the Unicode Hex Input source, hold Option and type the same four digits. In HTML they are ґ ґ, є є, і і, ї ї, ʼ ʼ and ₴ ₴.

On a phone, add Ukrainian as a second keyboard language in Gboard, SwiftKey or the iPhone keyboard settings; і, ї and є sit on their own keys or under a long press, and ґ usually appears when you hold г. Or click any letter on this page to copy it.

Ukrainian alphabet to English: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv

Ukraine's official romanization, adopted in 2010 and used in passports and on road signs, writes Г as h, Ґ as g, Х as kh, Ж as zh, Ч as ch, Ш as sh and Щ as shch. Є, Ї, Й and Ю change with position: at the start of a word they are ye, yi, y and yu, inside it ie, i, i and iu. The soft sign and the apostrophe are dropped. That is why Київ is Kyiv, Харків is Kharkiv, Львів is Lviv and Запоріжжя is Zaporizhzhia.

These spellings follow Ukrainian pronunciation rather than Russian; Kyiv had already been gaining use among media organizations, governments and international bodies, and the AP adopted it in 2019.

Where Ukrainian is spoken

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language and the only state language of Ukraine. CLDR estimates about 24 million speakers, about 23 million of them in Ukraine; other estimates give around 32 million native speakers and about 39 million in all, and in Ukraine's 2001 census about two thirds of the people named Ukrainian as their native language. Its closest relatives are Belarusian and Rusyn, and in vocabulary it is also close to Polish and Slovak.

Outside Ukraine, CLDR estimates about 500,000 speakers in Moldova, 150,000 in Poland, 140,000 in Canada, home of one of the oldest Ukrainian diasporas, and 100,000 in Slovakia; since 2022 many more speak it in Germany, Poland and across Europe. For the neighbouring alphabets see our Belarusian, Rusyn, Russian, Polish and Slovak collections, and for the flag, the trident and the country's emoji, the Ukraine collection.