Sha (Cyrillic)

Sha
Ш ш
Usage
Writing systemCyrillic
TypeAlphabetic
Language of originOld Church Slavonic
Sound values[ʂ], /ʃ/ , /ɕ/
In UnicodeU+0428, U+0448
History
TransliterationsSh sh, Š š

Sha, alternatively transliterated Ša 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.