Yo (Cyrillic)

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Yo (Ё, ё) is the seventh letter of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, invented to replace the recklessly confused е and o for soft o. It is used in the Russian and Belarusian languages, along with many of the Caucasian and Turkic languages which use or used the Cyrillic alphabet, but not in many of the other Slavic languages.

It is spoken as an iotated or palatalized O (/jo/ as in yolk, or /ʲo/), but when following a postalveolar fricative, like ж, ч, ш and щ, is pronounced simply as [o]. This letter's syllable is always under stress.

Yo is identical in form to ye, as well as Latin E, except for a symbol similar to an umlaut or diaeresis. This diacritic serves no regular function in Russian (as it does in German or French), and is solely used to differentiate this letter from ye. It was first used at the end of 18th century in literary works by Karamzin, but it has not gained standard usage until 1940s. Many loanwords still conventionaly use a combination of 'й' and 'о' to indicate palatalization.

Though in common use after WWII, in printed Russian yo is still replaced by the letter ye due to their similar appearance and the ability for speakers to tell by context which sound is represented. Its use is mandatory in dictionaries, children's books and textbooks for foreign learners.

Some Russian authors (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) and periodicals (Literaturnaya Gazeta) always publish their texts with yo.

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 Union as Khrushchev and Gorbachev though their surnames end in Russian with -ёв, better transcribed ov.

In Belarusian it is considered improper to replace "yo" with "ye".

Yo (Cyrillic)

See also