Cyrillic script in Unicode

As of Unicode version 16.0, Cyrillic script is encoded across several blocks:

The characters in the range U+0400–U+045F are basically the characters from ISO 8859-5 moved upward by 864 positions. The next characters in the Cyrillic block, range U+0460–U+0489, are historical letters, some of which are still used for Church Slavonic. The characters in the range U+048A–U+04FF and the complete Cyrillic Supplement block (U+0500–U+052F) are additional letters for various languages that are written with Cyrillic script. Two characters are in the Phonetic Extensions block: U+1D2B CYRILLIC LETTER SMALL CAPITAL EL from the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and U+1D78 MODIFIER LETTER CYRILLIC EN for transcribing nasal vowels.

Unicode includes few precomposed accented Cyrillic letters; the others can be combined by adding U+0301 ́ COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT after the accented vowel (e.g., е́ у́ э́); see below.

Several diacritical marks not specific to Cyrillic can be used with Cyrillic text, including:

  • in Combining Diacritical Marks block U+0300–U+036F.
    • U+0301 ◌́ COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT (as common Cyrillic stress mark).
    • U+0300 ◌̀ COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT (as stress mark in Bulgarian).
    • U+0303 ◌̃ COMBINING TILDE (in non Slavic languages)
    • U+0304 ◌̄ COMBINING MACRON (in non Slavic languages)
    • U+0306 ◌̆ COMBINING BREVE (with й but also other letters in non Slavic languages)
    • U+0307 ◌̇ COMBINING DOT ABOVE (in transliterations of other writing systems)
    • U+0308 ◌̈ COMBINING DIAERESIS (in non Slavic languages)
    • U+030A ◌̊ COMBINING RING ABOVE (in non Slavic languages)
    • U+030B ◌̋ COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT (in non Slavic languages)
    • U+030C ◌̌ COMBINING CARON (in non Slavic languages)
    • U+030F ◌̏ COMBINING DOUBLE GRAVE ACCENT (with ѷ in old spelling)
    • U+0311 ◌̑ COMBINING INVERTED BREVE (in 19th century Aleut alphabet)
    • U+0323 ◌̣ COMBINING DOT BELOW (in transliterations of other writing systems)
    • U+0328 ◌̨ COMBINING OGONEK (in 19th century Polish cyrillic alphabet, in 19th century Lithuanian cyrillic alphabet)[1]
    • U+0331 ◌̱ COMBINING MACRON BELOW (in transliterations of other writing systems)
    • U+033E ◌̾ COMBINING VERTICAL TILDE (in 19th century Polish cyrillic alphabet)
  • in Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols block U+20D0–U+20F0
    • U+20DD ◌⃝ COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE (as Cyrillic ten thousands sign).

In the table below, small letters are ordered according to their Unicode numbers; capital letters are placed immediately before the corresponding small letters. Standard Unicode names and canonical decompositions are included.

  1. ^ Subačius, Giedrius (2008). "The letter <Ј> and Lithuanian Cyrillic script: two language planning strategies in the late nineteenth century". Journal of Baltic Studies. 39 (1): 73–82. doi:10.1080/01629770801908747. JSTOR 43212808.)

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