Russian consonants
Hard and soft Russian consonants
Almost all Russian consonants have two sounds: a hard one and a soft one.
The softness can be achieved by a vowel that follows the consonant. Out of 10 Russian vowels, 5 are soft and make the preceding consonant soft as well.
Listen to the following syllables and compare:
Another way to achieve softness is using the soft sign. Listen and compare:
In transcription, the soft sign is indicated by an apostrophe [ ‘ ].
Some of the consonants are always soft (Ч, Щ), and some others are always hard (Ж, Ц, Ш). It means that neither the following vowel nor the soft sign change the way they sound.
Hardness or softness play a big role and might change the meaning of some words. Here are a few examples:
| кон [kon] | game, round | |
| конь [kon’] | horse | |
| у́гол [ú-gol] | corner | |
| у́голь [ú-gol’] | coal | |
| лук [luk] | onion | |
| люк [lyuk] | hatch |
Voiced and voiceless Russian consonants
Consonants in Russian can be voiced or voiceless.
To explain the concept of voiced and voiceless consonants, let’s take the English letters V and F. To pronounce both them, you put your lips in the same position, but for V you make a loud sound, and for F you don’t, like you are wispering it. So V is voiced and F is voiceless.
Following this principal, some Russian consonants form pairs where one consonant is voiced and the other one is voiceless (in the audio you can hear only the sound that the letter makes and not how it is pronounced “correctly” when reading the alphabet):
| Voiced | Voiceless | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Б б [b] | П п [p] | ||
| В в [v] | Ф ф [f] | ||
| Г г [g] | К к / Х х [k / kh] | ||
| Д д [d] | Т т [t] | ||
| Ж ж [zh] | Ш ш [sh] | ||
| З з [z] | С с [s] | ||
Why is it important?
Knowing these pairs will help you to master the Russian pronunciation. Here are the rules:
– Voiced consonants become voiceless when they are followed by other voiceless consonants or are the very end of a word.
– Voiceless consonants sound as their voiced counterparts when they are followed by the consonants Б, Г, Д, Ж, З.
Other Russian consonants are voiced and voiceless too, but they don’t have a pair and don’t change their sound regardless of the position in a word and surrounding letters.