Romanian Cyrillic alphabet

The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet is the Cyrillic alphabet that was used to write the Romanian language and Church Slavonic until the 1860s, when it was officially replaced by a Latin-based Romanian alphabet. Cyrillic remained in occasional use until the 1920s, mostly in Russian-ruled Bessarabia.

From the 1830s until the full adoption of the Latin alphabet, the Romanian transitional alphabet was in place, combining Cyrillic and Latin letters, and including some of the Latin letters with diacritics that remain in the modern Romanian alphabet. The Romanian Orthodox Church continued using the alphabet in its publications until 1881.

The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet is not the same as the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet (which is based on the modern Russian alphabet) that was used in the Moldavian SSR for most of the Soviet era and that is still used in Transnistria.

Rules

The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet had many rules on the writing of its letters that make it challenging to read at first:

1. 'ь' is used to indicate a word ends in a consonant. This was eventually dropped to reduce printing cost.

2. 'й' is the equivalent of unstressed и at the end of a word.

3. Є, Ѻ, Оу, Ꙗ are the initial variants of Е, О, Ꙋ, Ѧ respectively.

4. Ї is the equivalent of И before a vowel. It is also used in Greek loanwords.

5. Ꙟ is the equivalent of ын/ым before a consonant.

6. Ѯ Ѱ Ѳ Ѵ are only used in Greek loanwords.

Table of correspondence

The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was close to the contemporary version of the Early Cyrillic alphabet of the Church Slavonic liturgical language.

Unregulated transitional alphabets

Starting with the 1830s and ending with the official adoption of the Latin alphabet, there were no regulations for writing Romanian, and various alphabets using Cyrillic and Latin letters, besides the mid-transitional version in the table above, were used, sometimes two or more of them in a single book. The following table shows some of the many alphabets used in print.

Example of Romanian Cyrillic text

According to a document from the 1850s, this is how the Romanian Lord's Prayer looked in Cyrillic script. Transcriptional values correspond to the above table.