Home > Yo (Cyrillic)

It was introduced along with the Russian orthography reform of 1708 by Peter I who presented the reformed orthography as the "civil script".

It is spoken as an iotated or palatized O ("yo", IPA [jo]), but when following a postalveolar fricative, like ж, ч, ш and щ, is pronounced simply as [o].

Yo is identical in form to ye, as well as Latin E, except for a symbol similar to an umlaut or diaresis. This diacriticA diacritic mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. The word derives from Greek , distinguishing and diacritical is used to mean distinguishing or distinctive. The mark can be added over, under, or through the letter. But not al serves no regular function in Russian (as it does in GermanGerman (called Deutsch in German in which germanisch refers to prechristian times), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and one of the world's major languages. It is the language with the most native speakers in the European Union. or FrenchFrench le francais la langue francaise is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered only by Spanish and Portuguese. French is the 11th most spoken language in the world, spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother to), and is added only to differentiate this letter from ye.

Though in common use after WWII, yo is disappearing in printed Russian, replaced by the letter ye due to their similar appearance. It is still used in children's books and textbooks for foreign learners, and is used idiosyncratically in handwriting.

The fact that yo is frequently replaced with ye in print often causes some confusion to non-Russians, as it makes Russian words and names harder to transcribe accurately. One recurring problem is with Russian surnames, as both -ев(-ev) and -ёв(-ov) are common endings. Thus the English-speaking world knows two leaders of the former Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1 as Khrushchev and Gorbachev though their surnames end in Russian with -ёв, better transcribed ov.

See also: E (Cyrillic), O (Cyrillic), Epsilon (letter), E, Reforms of Russian orthography.