Cyrillic Small Letter Che

Usually the “ch” in “church.” The exact quality shifts by language: Ukrainian pronounces ч firm, while Russian ч is soft, closer to the “ch” in “cheese.” Latin spellings shift too: ch in common English romanization, č in Serbian Latin script.

Russian has one famous exception: in что (“what”) and чтобы (“in order to”), the written ч is pronounced like ш, the “sh” sound.

Where does ч come from?

It belongs to the early Cyrillic writing tradition. The oldest surviving manuscripts in Old Church Slavonic, the first written literary language of the Slavs, are in Glagolitic, an earlier Slavic script. Cyrillic adapted Greek letters and added signs for Slavic sounds Greek lacked. The earliest Cyrillic evidence is in religious Old Church Slavonic manuscripts from the 10th century.

Historical tables pair Cyrillic ч with the Glagolitic sign ⱍ. Later printed Glagolitic examples dated 1561 and 1629 call that sign Cherv and Chrivi. This is a documented correspondence, not proof that the modern Cyrillic shape descended directly from it.