Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet

The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet is a way to write the Romanian language that was used in the Soviet Union. It was officially used from 1924 to 1932 and from 1938 to 1989. It is still used today in the region of Transnistria.

Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	1924–1932, 1938–1989
Languages	Moldovan language
Related scripts
Parent systems	Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Greek Old Italic Glagolitic Cyrillic Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet
Unicode
Unicode range	U+0400–U+04FF, U+0500–U+052F, U+2DE0–U+2DFF, U+A640–U+A69F

Welcome (Bine ați venit!) sign in Moldovan Cyrillic in Tiraspol, the capital of Transnistria, in 2012

History

Before the 19th century, Romanian was written with a version of the Cyrillic alphabet. In the 19th century, Romania switched to a Latin alphabet. However, the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet was created in the 1920s for the Moldavian ASSR. This was to make Moldovan different from Romanian. It was replaced by a Latin alphabet in 1932 but brought back in 1938.

After the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, it was used in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1989 when it switched back to the Latin alphabet.

Today, Transnistria still uses the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet for official documents.

Description

The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet is mostly like the Russian alphabet, but it does not have the letters Ё, Щ, and Ъ. It also has the letter zhe with breve: Ӂ ӂ.

Here is a table showing the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet and its Latin equivalents:

Cyrillic letter	Latin letter	Name	IPA
А а	a	а (a)	/a/
Б б	b	бе (be)	/b/
В в	v	ве (ve)	/v/
Г г	g, gh	ге (ghe)	/ɡ/
Д д	d	де (de)	/d/
Е е	e, ie	е (e)	/e/, /je/
Ж ж	j	же (je)	/ʒ/
Ӂ ӂ	g, ge, gi	ӂе (ge)	/dʒ/
З з	z	зе (ze)	/z/
И и	i, ii	и (i)	/i/
Й й	i	и скурт (i scurt)	/j/
К к	c, ch	ка (ka)	/k/