Shcha


Shcha is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Russian, it represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative, similar to the pronunciation of in sheep. In Ukrainian and Rusyn, it represents the consonant cluster. In Bulgarian, it represents the consonant cluster. In Kurdish, it represents the consonant. Other non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic use this letter to spell the few loanwords that use it or foreign names; it is usually pronounced and is often omitted when teaching those languages.
In English, Shcha is romanized as or . English-speaking learners of Russian are often instructed to pronounce it in this way although it is not longer the standard pronunciation in Russian. The letter Щ in Russian and Ukrainian corresponds to ШЧ in related words in Belarusian.

History

The Cyrillic letter Shcha was derived from the Glagolitic letter Shta .
The name in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was and is preserved in modern Bulgarian; it is pronounced "штъ".
This letter was also used in Komi language for the consonant , currently represented by digraph тш.

Form

The form of the letter Shcha is the letter Cyrillic Sha with a descender, Tse,
Ka with descender, and En with descender.

Related letters and other similar characters