Yo was first used in
Russian, but its status in that language is now ambiguous. Yo occurs as a discrete letter in the Cyrillic alphabets of
Belarusian,
Rusyn,
Mongolian and many
Caucasian and
Turkic languages.
Russian created the letter ё The letter Yo or Jo is the seventh letter of the alphabet, but although it indicates a distinct sound from
Ye, it is often treated as the same letter for alphabetisation and sorting. In the dictionary, (hedgehog) comes after (eater) and before (to go). represents the
phoneme after or a soft
consonant (or occasionally after , ), and is almost always
stressed. It alternates with , written in non-stressed positions. Unstressed appears only in compound words (in this case it may be considered to have secondary stress; most notably, occurs in words containing the prefixes 'three-' and 'four-'), in derivatives of the name of the letter itself ( -
yoficator), in
loanwords ( - adjective from , from - surfer, -
shōjo, - ). In modern Russian,
Common Slavonic in a stressed syllable generally became after a
palatalized consonant, unless the vowel was followed by a second palatalized consonant. For example, compare ("
hedgehog") from
*ežь in contrast to ("
bream") from *
leščь; or ("
sturgeon") from *
esetrъ in contrast to ("granary, rack for drying grain") from *
esetь. The
diaeresis ◌̈ does not appear above any other letter in Russian. It serves no purpose except to differentiate between and . Except for a brief period after
World War II, the use of was never obligatory in standard Russian orthography. By and large, it is used only in dictionaries and in pedagogical literature intended for children and students of Russian as a second language. Otherwise, is used, and occurs only when it is necessary to avoid ambiguity (such as to distinguish between ("everybody") and ("everything") when it is not obvious from the context) or in words (principally proper nouns) whose pronunciation may not be familiar to the reader. Recent recommendations (2006) from the
Russian Language Institute are to use in proper nouns to avoid an incorrect pronunciation. It is permitted, however, to mark whenever it occurs, The spelling with — in the pre-1918 orthography— was based on Latin
seriosus.) The letter is normally used to transcribe the Japanese into Russian Cyrillic, appearing in the
Russian transcription of Japanese that would appear as
yo (よ),
kyo (きょ),
sho (しょ) etc. in
Hepburn Romanization, but there are a few traditional spellings which break this rule. For example, "Yokohama" is spelled in Russian with , not . Similarly, is used to
transcribe into Russian Cyrillic the Korean sounds
romanized as , and confusingly also for with the same letter. In such transcriptions, as well as in languages other than Russian where ё is used, the use of ё rather than е is obligatory. The -less Bulgarian uses (after consonants) and (word-initial and after vowels) for transcribing the foreign vowels or , and also for French labialized schwa: "de" and "le" are transcribed and in Russian but and in Bulgarian. However, in Ukrainian (which also lacks the letter and uses for and for ), the standard way for transcribing or in foreign names is .
Legal issues It is thought that the letter is found in at least 2500 surnames used in Russia and other states of the former USSR. It is common for a person who has one of these surnames to possess some legal documents (passports, identification cards, marriage and birth certificates, property ownership papers, etc.) where the name is written with a , and some that use the simple instead. In other situations, a child's birth certificate may have a and the parents' identity papers all have . On occasion such mismatches caused problems to citizens when receiving inheritances or completing property transactions.
Notes Belarusian and Rusyn Yo is the seventh letter of the
Belarusian alphabet and the ninth letter of the
Prešov Rusyn alphabet of Slovakia. In the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet, yo is absent. In Belarusian and Prešov Rusyn, the letters and are separate and not interchangeable.
Dungan Unlike the Russian spelling system, is mandatory in the Cyrillic alphabet used by
Dungan. In that
Sinitic language, the / distinction is crucial, as the former is used such as to write the syllable that would have the
pinyin spelling of
ye in
Standard Chinese, and the latter is used for the syllable that appears as
yao in pinyin. is very prominent in Dungan spelling since the very common syllable appearing as
yang in
Pinyin is spelled in Dungan.
Mongolian In the Cyrillic alphabet for the
Mongolian language, is the seventh letter, and it is always different from . It represents the syllable /jɔ/. For example, the word for "two" in Mongolian, "khoyor", is spelled as хо
ёр.
Tajik In the
Tajik language, ⟨ё⟩ is used for the syllable /jɔː/.
Ukrainian In some older alphabets used for
Ukrainian, such as
Panteleimon Kulish's Kulishivka's alphabet, was formerly used for the sound —. This letter no longer exists in the modern
Ukrainian alphabet. In modern Ukrainian spelling, the sound — is written as after soft consonants in the middle of words (such as "н
ього", "him" after a preposition), and elsewhere (such as "
його", "him"). The standard way to transcribe the foreign phonemes or in Ukrainian is with the letter . ==Related letters and other similar characters==