Sha (Cyrillic)
| Sha | |
|---|---|
| Ш ш | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Cyrillic |
| Type | Alphabetic |
| Language of origin | Old Church Slavonic |
| Sound values | [ʂ], /ʃ/ ⓘ, /ɕ/ ⓘ |
| In Unicode | U+0428, U+0448 |
| History | |
| Transliterations | Sh sh, Š š |
Sha, alternatively transliterated Ša (Ш ш; italics: Ш ш) is a letter of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/, like the pronunciation of sh in "ship". More precisely, the sound in Russian denoted by ш is often falsely transcribed as a palatoalveolar fricative, but is actually a voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/. It is used in every variation of the Cyrillic alphabet for Slavic and non-Slavic languages.
In English, Sha is romanized as sh or as š, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian and Lithuanian.