A (Cyrillic)



А (А а; italics: А а ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents an open central unrounded vowel, halfway between the pronunciation of $\langlea\rangle$ in "cat" and "father". The Cyrillic letter А is romanized using the A|Latin letter A.

History
The Cyrillic letter А was derived directly from the Greek letter Alpha (Α α). In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was (azǔ), meaning "I". In the Cyrillic numeral system, the Cyrillic letter А has a value of 1.

Form
Throughout history, the Cyrillic letter А has had various shapes, but today is standardised on one that looks exactly like the Latin letter A, including the italic and lower case forms.

Usage
In most languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet – such as Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian and Montenegrin – the Cyrillic letter А represents the open central unrounded vowel. In Ingush and Chechen the Cyrillic letter А represents both the open back unrounded vowel and the mid-central vowel. In Tuvan the letter can be written as a double vowel.

Related letters and other similar characters

 * A a : A|Latin letter A
 * Á á : Á|Latin letter Á
 * Α α : Α|Greek letter Alpha
 * Ă ă : Ă|Latin letter A with Breve
 * Â â : Â|Latin letter A with Circumflex
 * Ā ā : Ā|Latin letter A with Macron
 * Æ æ : Æ|Latin letter Æ
 * Ă ă : Latin letter A with breve