Cyrillic vs Russian

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Serbian Cyrillic is not the only Cyrillic

You can already read the azbuka (the lesson “Cyrillic print”). But Serbian is not the only language written in Cyrillic: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian and Macedonian use it too, and the Cyrillic you have most likely met before — on the news, on packaging, on a keyboard sticker, in your font menu — is Russian. It shares most of its shapes with Serbian: twenty-four of the thirty Serbian letters, а б в г д е ж з и к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш, are in the Russian alphabet too. That is the catch: a sign, a keyboard or a font made for Russian looks right and can still mislead you.

This lesson is a checklist, not a new alphabet: the letters other Cyrillics have and Serbian does not; the six Serbian letters they lack; the shared letters you may have learnt to read the Russian way; and three practical traps — alphabetical order, italic shapes, keyboards and fonts. You need no Russian at all: each foreign letter is shown once, only so that you recognise it.

Nine letters you will never see in Serbian

Start with what is missing. Russian uses nine letters that never appear in Serbian (Ukrainian and Bulgarian share several of them). If a Cyrillic word contains one, it is not Serbian. The right-hand columns show how Serbian writes the same sounds.

Look at the pattern in the first five rows. Where Russian packs “y + vowel” into a single letter, Serbian spells out both sounds: ј plus the vowel, just as English writes y + a in yard. Russian even lets its ordinary е carry a hidden “y” at the start of a word — that is why Russian names in English begin with “Ye”: Yevgeny, Yekaterinburg, Yeltsin. Serbian е never does this. When Serbian means “ye”, it writes је: један (one), је (is). Nothing is packed and nothing is hidden: ја is “ya”, југ (south) is “yug”, and мој ends in a plain ј.

Six Serbian letters other Cyrillics lack

Now the additions. Six Serbian letters appear nowhere on a Russian alphabet chart, and a Russian keyboard has no keys for them (more on that below). Macedonian Cyrillic shares four of them, ј љ њ џ. You already know all six from latinica as j lj nj ć đ dž:

Three of them are easy to picture: љ is л with a loop on the right, њ is н with the same loop, and ј was borrowed from Latin and looks just like J, though in a Cyrillic word it is a Cyrillic letter. The hard ones are ћ and ђ, shapes found in no Cyrillic you are likely to have seen before. Anchor them to three frequent words — ноћ, кућа, ђак — and you will soon recognise them at a glance.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

Serbian Cyrillic vs other Cyrillics

30 letters (Russian: 33), cut by Vuk Karadžić to piši kao što govoriš, “write as you speak”: one letter = one sound. 24 letters (а б в г д е ж з и к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш) are also Russian — the source of every trap below.

Nine foreign letters: never in Serbian

“Ye” is је: један (one), је (is). Serbian е never hides a “y”.

Six Serbian letters

љ, њ = л, н + a loop; ј looks like Latin J; learn ћ, ђ by ноћ, кућа, ђак.

Same letter, Serbian reading

Look-alike words

• сад = now (short for сада); sad is not English “sad”
• реч = word; слово = letter of the alphabet
• право = often straight ahead; вредан = hard-working; искуство = experience

Order, italics, keyboard

• Azbuka: А Б В Г Д Ђ Е Ж З И Ј К Л Љ М Н Њ О П Р С Т Ћ У Ф Х Ц Ч Џ Ш — ends with ш.
• Serbian italic: г often like ī, д like g, п often like ū, т like ш with a bar on top, б slightly different; handwritten ш often barred below.
• Use a Serbian Cyrillic layout; never Latin look-alikes (j, a, e, o, p, c).

Check