The Russian alphabet (Russian: русский алфавит, tr. rússkij alfavít; IPA: [ˈruskʲɪj ɐlfɐˈvʲit]) uses letters from the Cyrillic script. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters.
The Russian alphabet is as follows:
The consonant letters represent both as "soft" (palatalized, represented in the IPA with a ⟨ʲ⟩) and "hard" consonant phonemes. If a consonant letter is followed by a vowel letter, then the soft/hard quality of the consonant depends on whether the vowel is meant to follow "hard" consonants ⟨а, о, э, у, ы⟩ or "soft" ones ⟨я, ё, е, ю, и⟩; see below. A handful of consonant phonemes do not have phonemically distinct "soft" and "hard" variants. See Russian phonology for details.
The frequency of characters in a corpus of written Russian was found to be as follows: