Ya or Ja (Я я; italics: Я я) is a letter of the Cyrillic script, the civil script variant of Old Cyrillic Little Yus () or maybe even 'Ꙗ'.  Among modern Slavic languages, it is used in the East Slavic languages and Bulgarian. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by Mongolian and many Uralic, Caucasian and Turkic languages of the former Soviet Union.

Pronunciation

The iotated vowel is pronounced  in initial or post-vocalic positions, like the English pronunciation of  in "yard".

When  follows a soft consonant, no  sound occurs between the consonant and the vowel.

The exact pronunciation of the vowel sound of  depends also on the following sound by allophony in the Slavic languages. In Russian, before a soft consonant, it is , like in the English "cat". If a hard consonant follows  or none, the result is an open vowel, usually []. This difference does not exist in the other Cyrillic languages.

In non-stressed positions, the vowel reduction depends on the language and the dialect. The standard Russian language reduces the vowel to [], but yakanye dialects  undergo no reduction unlike other instances of the  phoneme (represented with the letter ). In Bulgarian, the vowel sound is reduced to  in unstressed syllables and is pronounced  in both stressed verb and definite article endings.

History 

The letter , known as little jus (yus) (, ) originally stood for a front nasal vowel, conventionally transcribed as ę. The history of the letter (in both Church Slavonic and vernacular texts) varies according to the development of this sound in the different areas where Cyrillic was used.

In Serbia, [ɛ̃] became [e] at a very early period and the letter  ceased to be used, being replaced by e. In Bulgaria the situation is complicated by the fact that dialects differ and that there were different orthographic systems in use, but broadly speaking [ɛ̃] became [ɛ] in most positions, but in some circumstances it merged with [ǫ], particularly in inflexional endings, e.g. the third person plural ending of the present tense of certain verbs such as  (Modern Bulgarian правят). The letter continued to be used, but its distribution, particularly in regard to the other yuses, was governed as much by orthographical convention as by phonetic value or etymology.

After the Bulgarian language adopted the civil script, the sound /ja/ would come to be represented by the letter я, despite etymological я being pronounced /ɛ/.

Among the Eastern Slavs, [ɛ̃] was denasalised, probably to [æ], which palatalised the preceding consonant; after palatalisation became phonemic, the /æ/ phoneme merged with /a/, and ѧ henceforth indicated /a/ after a palatalised consonant, or else, in initial or post-vocalic position, /ja/. However, Cyrillic already had a character with this function, namely , so that for the Eastern Slavs these two characters were henceforth equivalent. The alphabet in Meletij Smotrickij's grammar of 1619 accordingly lists "" ("ꙗ ili ѧ", "ꙗ or ѧ"); he explains that  is used initially and  elsewhere. (In fact he also distinguishes the feminine form of the accusative plural of the third person pronoun  from the masculine and neuter .) This reflects the practice of earlier scribes and was further codified by the Muscovite printers of the seventeenth century (and is continued in modern Church Slavonic). However, in vernacular and informal writing of the period, the two letters may be used completely indiscriminately.
It was in Russian cursive (skoropis') writing of this time that the letter acquired its modern form: the left-hand leg of  was progressively shortened, eventually disappearing altogether, while the foot of the middle leg shifted towards the left, producing the я shape.

In the specimens of the civil script produced for Peter I, forms of  and я were grouped together; Peter removed the first two, leaving only я in the modern alphabet, and its use in Russian remains the same to the present day. It was similarly adopted for the standardised orthographies of modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, both Old Cyrillic and civil scripts were used for printing, with я in the latter corresponding to  in the former, and there were various attempts to standardise the orthography, of which some, such as the Plovdiv school exemplified by Nayden Gerov, were more conservative, essentially preserving the Middle Bulgarian distribution of the letter, others attempted to rationalise spelling on more phonetic principles, and one project in 1893 proposed abolishing the letter я altogether. By the early twentieth century, under Russian influence, я came to be used for  (which is not a reflex of ę in Bulgarian), retaining its use for  but was no longer used for other purposes; this is its function today.

Use in loanwords and transcriptions 
In Russian, the letter has little use in loanwords and orthographic transcriptions of foreign words. A notable exception is the use of   to transcribe , mostly from Romance languages, Polish, German and Arabic. This makes  to match [] better than its dark l pronunciation in .  is also used to transcribe Romanian , pronounced as .

Although  is a distinctive pronunciation of  in Russian, the letter is almost never used to transcribe that sound, unlike the use of  to approximate close front and central rounded vowels. Nonetheless,  is used for Estonian and Finnish  – for instance, Pärnu is written  in Russian, although the Russian pronunciation does not match the original.

Related letters and other similar characters
Ѧ ѧ: Cyrillic letter Little Yus
: Cyrillic letter Iotated A
ᴙ : Latin letter small capital reversed R, used informally in phonetics to represent the epiglottal trill (see IPA consonants)
Â â: Latin letter Â - a Romanian and Vietnamese letter
R r: Latin letter R

Computing codes
Unicode provides separate code-points for the Old Cyrillic and civil script forms of this letter.  A number of Old Cyrillic fonts developed before the publication of Unicode 5.1 placed iotated A () at the code points for Ya (Я/я) instead of the Private Use Area, but since Unicode 5.1, iotated A has been encoded separately from Ya.

See also
Faux Cyrillic

References

External links