How many graphemes?
Rather more surprising than the uncertainty about the number of phonemes is the uncertainty about the number of graphemes in Russian. Two signs, the soft sign we have already noted and the hard sign are not regarded as graphemes proper. They are not letters of the alphabet in the sense that they represent sounds – they are only used as auxiliary symbols to resolve spelling cruces. In the case of the symbol <ё>, the two dots are hardly ever used, except by learners of the language and in cases where disambiguation is highly desirable. A standard example is the word vs’o (7) which can be an adverb meaning all the time or increasingly, as opposed to vs’e (8) with the meaning of all, and it is sometimes quite important contextually to make that distinction.
