Shcha

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Cyrillic letter

title: "Shcha" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["cyrillic-letters"] description: "Cyrillic letter" topic_path: "general/cyrillic-letters" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shcha" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Cyrillic letter ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox grapheme"]

Field	Value
script	Cyrillic
type	Alphabet
typedesc	ic
name	Shcha
image	Cyrillic letter Shcha - uppercase and lowercase.svg
phonemes	[], [], []
fam1	Ⱋ ⱋ
equivalents	Shch shch, Šč šč, Ŝ ŝ
letter	Щ щ
language	Old Church Slavonic
unicode	U+0429, U+0449
::

Shcha (Щ щ; italics: Щ щ or Щ щ; italics: Щ щ), Shta, or Scha is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Russian, it represents the long (sometimes short) voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative , similar to the pronunciation of sh in 'sheep'. In Bulgarian, it represents the consonant cluster , like the pronunciation of “scht” in Borscht. In Ukrainian and Rusyn, it represents the consonant cluster . Most 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 , an approximation of the Russian pronunciation of the letter, and is often omitted when teaching those languages.

In English, Russian Shcha is romanized as , , or occasionally as , all reflecting the historical Russian pronunciation of the letter (as a combined Ш and Ч). English-speaking learners of Russian are often instructed to pronounce it in this way although it is no longer the standard pronunciation in Russian (it still is in Ukrainian and Rusyn, as above). The letter Щ in Russian and Ukrainian corresponds to ШЧ in related words in Belarusian.

History

Cyrillic Щ (Early Cyrillic form: [[File:Early Cyrillic letter Shta.svg|20px]]) is derived from the Glagolitic letter shta , which was a ligature of sha (= Cyrillic Ш, pronounced ), and tverdo (= Cyrillic Т, pronounced ). The original pronunciation, , is maintained in Bulgarian.

This letter was also used in the Komi language as , but it has fallen out of use in favour of digraph .

Form

The form of the letter shcha is considered to have originated as a ligature of the letters Ш and Т. However in later orthographies it began to be depicted as the letter Cyrillic Sha (Ш ш) with a descender. The descender (also used in Ц) has been reinterpreted as a diacritic and used in several letters for non-Slavic languages, such as Ң and Қ.

Related letters and other similar characters

Ш ш : Cyrillic letter Sha
С́ с́ : Montenegrin Sje
Ŝ ŝ : Latin letter Ŝ
Ś ś : Latin letter Ś

Encodings

Computing codes

References

"Cyrillic script".
Maier, Ingrid. (2021). "Russian Pronunciation Rules in the Alphabetum Russarum (Stockholm, Peter van Selow)". Slovo: Journal of Slavic Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
(July 2018). "Proceedings of the 2018 4th International Conference on Economics, Social Science, Arts, Education and Management Engineering (ESSAEME 2018)". Atlantis Press.
Schenker, Alexander M.. (1995). "The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology". Yale University Press.
(1869). "Grammaire paléoslave, suivie de textes paléoslaves". [s. n.].

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