Ukrainian alphabet
Overview
 
The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...

 used to write Ukrainian
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....

, the official language of Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

. It is one of the national variations of the Cyrillic script.

In Ukrainian it is called Украї́нська абе́тка ukrɑˈjinʲsʲkɑ ɑˈbɛtkɑ, Ukrayins’ka abetka (from the initial letters a and be), алфаві́т, alfavit, or archaically азбу́ка, azbuka (from the acrophonic early Cyrillic letter names az and buki).

Ukrainian text is sometimes romanized
Romanization
In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...

: written in the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

, for non-Cyrillic readers or transcription systems. See romanization of Ukrainian
Romanization of Ukrainian
The romanization or Latinization of Ukrainian is the representation of the Ukrainian language using Latin letters. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, a variation of Cyrillic....

 for details of specific romanization systems. There have also been several historical proposals for a native Latin alphabet for Ukrainian, but none has caught on.
Note: before the publication of the official Ukrainian Orthography (1990), the alphabetical order ended with ю, я, ь.

The alphabet comprises thirty-three letters, representing thirty-eight phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

s (meaningful units of sound), and an additional sign—the apostrophe.
 
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