A lot of people see Cyrillic and their first thought is “Russian”. But Russian is only one of many languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet. And though it’s difficult to identify which language it is without having a familiarity with pretty much all of them, there are a few things you can look for to at least figure out if it’s Russian or not without needing much familiarity with the Russian language or the Cyrillic alphabet.
Here’s a few things to look out for:
Latin letters that should not be there: There are many letters in the Cyrillic alphabet that look like latin letters. Some even produce the same sound. Russian in particular has letters such as e, o, and c. Some will be like the latin letters but their lowercase forms are different from the latin such as в, т, к, or н. And then there’s a bunch that are close but not quite like я, ш, or и. However if you see Ii, Jj, or Ss, or even this funky looking not-f, Ғғ: Not Russian.
(Note, the uppercase I can look like lowercase L in sans serif fonts, Russian’s lowercase l is this guy: л. So I or l: not Russian.
Watch out for Y: Russian has the letter Уу, with the upper case form being distinct from the traditional latin uppercase form. So if you’re seeing something that looks like a very normal latin uppercase Y: Not Russian.
Diacritics: The only Russian letter with dots over it is ё and the only other letter with any other kind of diacritic is й. If accents are present it could be a Russian learner’s text with the accents marking stress. If this were the case you would see on accent mark per word on nearly every word and they would go over the vowels (аэиоуяейёю). But if you’re seeing accents over consonants or diacritic marks over letters like ї or ў: Not Russian.
Descenders: Russian has three letters with descenders (the little tail poking out at the bottom) Д, Ц and Щ. If you’re seeing things like Җ or Қ (compare to Ж and К, two Russian letters) or even other types of descenders such as Џ or Ҙ: Not Russian.
(Note that in English normally when we talk about descenders we talk about p and y with the parts that go below the line being the descenders. It works the same in Cyrillic except the parts that go below the line are fewer and look more like a little fang attached on the end than a descender as we think of it, but there are three, and two should be easily recognizable to your eyes: p and y, the third is lowercase ф.)
An overabundance of ъ: While it is part of the Russian alphabet, modern Russian uses this symbol sparingly. If you’re spotting this symbol all over the place in a text it’s probably not Russian, but there is a chance that it’s an old text back when ъ was used far more often in written Russian.
The weird A’s: Ѧ, Ѫ, Ѩ, or Ѭ, I call them the weird A’s because they always looked like alien A’s to me. If you spot these not only is it not Russian, but it’s not any modern language today. You’ve just found really old Cyrillic.
Obviously this isn’t super definitive and it’s possible that something can pass all these tests and still not be Russian, but you’ve at the very least got a much smaller list of “languages it could possibly be”.
If the text you’ve found is cursive or italic: Good luck.
The image at the top is an 1850s Romanian text of the Lord’s Prayer, written with the Cyrillic script, from Wikimedia Commons
