Ukrainian alphabet

Ukrainian alphabet Українська абетка
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	15th century (Ruthenian), 18th century (Modern Ukrainian) to present
Official script	Cyrillic
Languages	Ukrainian
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs[1] Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet (partly Glagolitic alphabet) Early Cyrillic alphabet Ukrainian alphabet
Sister systems	Ukrainian Latin Pannonian Rusyn Carpathian Rusyn alphabets Russian Belarusian Bulgarian
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Cyrl (220), ​Cyrillic
Unicode
Unicode alias	Cyrillic
Unicode range	Subset of Cyrillic (U+0400 ... U+04FF)
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Ukrainian alphabet (Ukrainian: абе́тка, áзбука or алфа́ві́т, romanized: abetka, azbuka or alfavit) is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, called Old Slavonic. In the 10th century, Cyrillic script became used in Kievan Rus' to write Old East Slavic, from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian alphabets later evolved. The modern Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters in total: 21 consonants, 1 semivowel, 10 vowels and 1 palatalization sign. Sometimes the apostrophe (') is also included, which has a phonetic meaning and is a mandatory sign in writing, but is not considered as a letter and is not included in the alphabet.

In Ukrainian, it is called українська абетка (IPA: [ʊkrɐˈjinʲsʲkɐ ɐˈbɛtkɐ]; tr. ukrainska abetka), from the initial letters а (tr. a) and б (tr. b); алфавіт (tr. alfavit); or, archaically, азбука (tr. azbuka), from the acrophonic early Cyrillic letter names азъ (tr. az) and буки (tr. buki).

Ukrainian text is sometimes romanised (written in the Latin alphabet) for non-Cyrillic readers or transcription systems. There are several common methods for romanizing Ukrainian including the international Cyrillic-to-Latin transcription standard ISO 9. There have also been several historical proposals for a native Ukrainian Latin alphabet, but none have caught on.