token from 1705 containing Ѧ All modern Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet have lost the nasal vowels (at least in their standard varieties), making yus unnecessary.
In Bulgarian and Macedonian Big yus was a part of the
Bulgarian alphabet until 1945. However, by then, in the eastern dialects, the back nasal was pronounced the same way as
ъ . Since the new Soviet-sponsored regime wanted to break with the one which it replaced at the end of
WWII and closer align the official language with Russian, which was closer to the eastern dialects and had already
removed its Big Yus, the western pronunciations were deemed unliterary, and the letter was gone. There were some
Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects spoken around
Thessaloniki and
Kastoria in northern Greece (
Kostur dialect,
Solun dialect) that still preserve a nasal pronunciation e.g. (; "Where are you going, dear child?"), which could be spelled
pre-reform as "" with big and little yus. On a visit to
Razlog, in Bulgaria's
Pirin Macedonia, in 1955, the Russian dialectologist
Samuil Bernstein noticed that the nasal pronunciation of words like (hand), (child) could still be heard from some of the older women of the village. To the younger people, the pronunciation was completely alien; they would think that the old ladies were speaking
Modern Greek.
In Russian In
Russia, the little yus came to be pronounced as an iotated () in the middle or at the end of a word and therefore came to represent that sound also elsewhere; the modern letter is an adaptation of its cursive form of the 17th century, enshrined by the
typographical reform of 1708. (That is also why in Russian often corresponds to nasalized '
in Polish; cf. Russian ; Polish '.)
In Polish In
Polish, which is a Slavic language written in the
Latin alphabet, the letter
Ę ę has the phonetic value of little yus, and
Ą ą has that of big yus. The
iotated forms are written
ię/ję and
ią/ją, respectively. However, the phonemes written
ę and
ą are not directly descended from those represented by little and big yus but developed after the original nasals merged in Polish and then diverged again.
In Kashubian Kashubian uses the letter
ã in place of ѧ in reflexive pronoun sã (pol. się), and also in other words like
jãzëk (eng. tongue, pol.
język, ocs. ѩзꙑкъ), piãc (eng. five, pol. pięć, slk. päť, ocs. пѧть), cãżczi (eng. heavy, pol. ciężki, ocs. тѧжькъ), semiã (eng. seed, pol. siemię, ocs. сѣмѧ), miãso (eng. meat, pol. mięso, slk. mäso, ocs. мѧсо).
In Romanian Little and big yuses can also be found in the
Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, used until 1862. Little yus was used for and big yus for unknown vowels, transcribed in later Romanian as and . Now
Romanian uses the
Latin alphabet and is written
Îî or
Ââ. is written as
Ăă. One of the first transcriptions of the big yus as î in Romanian is found in
Acatist (1801,
Sibiu) by
Samuil Micu-Klein.
In Slovak Little yus in the
Slovak alphabet has been substituted by
a (
desať,
načať),
e (
plesať), iotated
ia (
žiadať,
kliatba,
mesiac),
ie (
bdieť) and
ä in several cases (
pamäť,
päť,
svätý). Big yus is transliterated and pronounced as
u, or accented
ú (
budeš,
muž,
mučeník,
ruka,
navyknúť,
pristúpiť,
púť,
usnúť). Iotated, and closed iotated form of little yus occur as
ja (e.g.
jazyk,
svoja,
javiť,
jasle).
In Ruthenian In
Ruthenian language, little yus was used to transcribe the sound
ja (as in руска(ѧ) мова ("Ruthenian language") or ѧзыкъ ("language")). This evolved into and corresponded with the letter я in the descendant languages of
Belarusian,
Ukrainian, and
Rusyn.
In Interslavic The
Interslavic language, a zonal,
constructed, semi-artificial language based on Proto-Slavic and Old Church Slavonic modified based on the commonalities between living Slavic languages, allows (though does not encourage it for intelligibility purposes) to use both the little and big yus when writing in the scientific variety of its Cyrillic script. The letters correspond directly to their etymological values from Proto-Slavic, but do not retain the nasal pronunciation, instead going for one aiming to convey the "middle-ground" sounds found in etymologically corresponding letters in living Slavic languages. The little yus corresponds to the Latin letter "ę", while the big yus to "ų" in the etymological Latin script. The iotated versions are not part of the standard scientific vocabulary, where the yuses are instead accompanied by the Cyrillic letter "ј", also used in the modern
Serbian and
Macedonian alphabets, though their use is optionally permissible for aesthetic reasons if one opts for using the more standard iotated vowels in their writing, so that consistency is preserved. As of May 2019, no official "scientific Cyrillic" is endorsed by the Interslavic Commission for the reason that while Latin is easier to modify by simply adding diacritics, Cyrillic requires completely distinct graphemes. That is very likely to significantly hamper intelligibility for first-time readers, so yus' should not be used in writing when aiming to convey an easily understandable message. ==Related letters and other similar characters==