Shcha (Щ щ), Shta, or Scha is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Russian, it represents the long voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕː/, similar to the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in Welsh-sheep. In Ukrainian and Rusyn, it represents the consonant cluster /ʃt͡ʃ/, something like cash-chest. In Bulgarian, it represents the consonant cluster /ʃt/, like the pronunciation of “scht” in Borscht. Most other non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic use this letter to spell the few loanwords that use it or foreign names; it is usually pronounced /ʃ/, an approximation of the Russian pronunciation of the letter, and is often omitted when teaching those languages.