Short I

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Look up Й or й in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Cyrillic letter Short I
Unicode (hex)
majuscule: U+0419
minuscule: U+0439
Cyrillic alphabet
А	Б	В	Г	Ґ	Д	Ђ
Ѓ	Е	Ѐ	Ё	Є	Ж	З
Ѕ	И	Ѝ	І	Ї	Й	Ј
К	Л	Љ	М	Н	Њ	О
П	Р	С	Т	Ћ	Ќ	У
Ў	Ф	Х	Ц	Ч	Џ	Ш
Щ	Ъ	Ы	Ь	Э	Ю	Я
Non-Slavic letters
Ӑ	Ӓ	Ә	Ӛ	Ӕ	Ғ	Ҕ
Ӻ	Ӷ	Ԁ	Ԃ	Ӗ	Ӂ	Җ
Ӝ	Ԅ	Ҙ	Ӟ	Ԑ	Ӡ	Ԇ
Ӣ	Ҋ	Ӥ	Қ	Ӄ	Ҡ	Ҟ
Ҝ	Ԟ	Ԛ	Ӆ	Ԓ	Ԡ	Ԉ
Ԕ	Ӎ	Ӊ	Ң	Ӈ	Ҥ	Ԣ
Ԋ	Ӧ	Ө	Ӫ	Ҩ	Ҧ	Ҏ
Ԗ	Ҫ	Ԍ	Ҭ	Ԏ	Ӯ	Ӱ
Ӳ	Ү	Ұ	Ҳ	Ӽ	Ӿ	Һ
Ҵ	Ҷ	Ӵ	Ӌ	Ҹ	Ҽ	Ҿ
Ӹ	Ҍ	Ӭ	Ԙ	Ԝ	Ӏ
Archaic letters
Ҁ	Ѻ	ОУ	Ѡ	Ѿ	Ѣ	Ꙓ
Ꙗ	Ѥ	Ѧ	Ѫ	Ѩ	Ѭ	Ѯ
Ѱ	Ѳ	Ѵ	Ѷ	Ꙟ
List of Cyrillic letters
Cyrillic digraphs

Short I (Й, й) is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И (which resembles a reversed Latin capital <N>), with a breve.

It is the eleventh letter in the Russian alphabet, and in Russian is called И краткое (I kratkoye or "short I").

It is the tenth letter in the Bulgarian alphabet and is called И кратко (I kratko or "short I") in Bulgarian. It is the fourteenth letter in the Ukrainian alphabet, and in Ukrainian is called Йот, (Yot) or Ий (Yi,or Iy, pronounced [ɪj]). It is also the eleventh letter of the Belarusian alphabet, however the letter И is not used in Belarusian.

In Russian and Bulgarian, short I represents the semivowel /j/ as in English toy. In Russian it appears predominantly in the form of diphthongs like /ij/ in широкий ('shirokiy','wide'), /aj/ in край ('kray', 'end', 'krai'), /ej/ in долей ('doley','portion'), /oj/ in горой ('goroy','mountain'), and /uj/ in буйство ('buystvo','rage'). It is transliterated as <j> (used amongst European languages), <y> (the most common), or <i> (the least common, likely to be ĭ), depending on which romanization system is used. See Transliteration of Russian into English and Romanization of Ukrainian. It is used in other positions only in foreign words, such as Йopк (York) or even fellow Slavic words like Йoвoвич (Yovovich).

Active use of <Й> (or, rather, the breve over <И>) began around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since the middle of the seventeenth century, the differentiation between <И> and <Й> has become obligatory in the Russian variant of Church Slavonic orthography (used for the Russian language as well). During the alphabet reforms of Peter I, all diacritic marks were removed from the Russian writing system, but shortly after his death in 1735, the distinction between <И> and <Й> was restored. <Й> was not officially considered a separate letter of the alphabet until the 1930s.

In Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, the letter Ј is used to represent the same sound. Latin-based Slavonic writing systems such as Polish, Czech and the Latin version of Serbian and Croatian also use the letter J (not the letter Y, as in English or French) for that purpose.

[edit] Code positions

[edit] See also

• И, и - I (Cyrillic)
• Ј, ј - Je (Cyrillic)
• Ў