Informal Romanizations of Russian - Russian Chat Alphabet

The Russian Chat Alphabet is a fast-to-type mix of Translit and Volapuk - being Translit mostly, it replaces some 2 or 3 character transliterations with shorter 1 character counterparts from Volapuk. This speeds up typing; however, in some cases characters may be volapuk-encoded, making text appear incorrectly and therefore be harder or impossible to read. In Russia and countries where Russian is used regularly to communicate via mobile phone and chat room, it is used as an alternate and free style of transliteration.

The main reason that transliteration is used with Russian is that in text messages you get more Latin characters for your money: usually 160 Latin characters per charged message versus 60/70 Cyrillic script. Obviously the onus is on getting one Latin symbol (of which there are 26) for each Cyrillic symbol (of which there are 33 in Russian, and extra symbols in Ukrainian and other Cyrillic-based languages). Only those used for Russian are exemplified here.

(Where variants are given, the first is most common and the last is less common - although trends change quickly and differ from person-to-person.)

• А - a
• Б - b, 6
• В - v
• Г - g, r
• Д - d, g (only in fonts with opentail g)
• Е - e (and ye, je, occasionally in word-initial and post-vowel positions, as well as following ъ or ь)
• Ё - e, yo, jo
• Ж - zh, g, *, j, }I{
• З - z, 3
• И - i, u
• Й - i, y, j
• К - k
• Л - l
• М - m
• Н - n
• О - o
• П - p
• Р - r
• С - s, c
• Т - t, m
• У - u, y
• Ф - f
• Х - h, x, kh
• Ц - c, ts, "U,"
• Ч - ch, 4
• Ш - sh, w, 6, "LLI"
• Щ - sh, "W,", sch, shh, shch, shsh
• Ъ - ' (apostrophe), " (quote marks),
• Ы - y, i, #
• Ь - ' (apostrophe), - usually only transcribed with "ль"
• Э - e
• Ю - yu, u, iu, ju,
• Я - ya, R, ia, ja, q, 9