For the sound in English sometimes represented by ĭ, see near-close near-front unrounded vowel.

Short I (Й й; italics: Й й) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И

I (Cyrillic)

I is a letter used in almost all ancient and modern Cyrillic alphabets.It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel , like the pronunciation of ⟨i⟩ in "machine", or the near-close near-front unrounded vowel , like the pronunciation of ⟨i⟩ in "bin".-History:The Cyrillic letter I was...

 with a breve

Breve

A breve is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. It resembles the caron , but is rounded, while the caron has a sharp tip...

.

Short I represents the palatal approximant

Palatal approximant

The palatal approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is '...

 /j/, like the pronunciation of ⟨y⟩ in toy.

It is transliterated

Transliteration

Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...

 as ⟨j⟩ (used amongst European languages

Languages of the European Union

The languages of the European Union are languages used by people within the member states of the European Union. They include the twenty-three official languages of the European Union along with a range of others...

), ⟨y⟩ (the most common), or ⟨i⟩ (the least common, likely to be ĭ

I

I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...

), depending on which romanization

Romanization

In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...

 system is used. See Transliteration of Russian into English and Romanization of Ukrainian

Romanization of Ukrainian

The romanization or Latinization of Ukrainian is the representation of the Ukrainian language using Latin letters. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, a variation of Cyrillic....

.

History

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 Peter I's 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.

Usage

Language	position in alphabet	name
Belarusian Belarusian language The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...	11th	і нескладовае
Bulgarian Bulgarian language Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...	10th	И кратко (I kratko or "short I")
Russian Russian language Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...	11th	И краткое (I kratkoye or "short I")
Ukrainian Ukrainian language Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....	14th	йот /jɔt/, й /ɪj/

In Russian, Short I appears predominantly in diphthongs like /ij/ in широкий (shirokiy 'wide'), /aj/ in край (kray 'end', 'krai

Krai

Krai or kray was a type of an administrative division in the Russian Empire and the Russian SFSR, and is one of the types of the federal subjects of modern Russia ....

'), /ej/ in долей (doley 'portion'), /oj/ in горой (goroy 'mountain'), and /uj/ in буйство (buystvo 'rage'). It is used in other positions only in foreign words, such as Йopк (York), or even fellow Slavic words like Йoвoвич (Yovovich).

In Serbo-Croatian

Serbo-Croatian language

Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...

 and Macedonian

Macedonian language

Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...

, the Cyrillic letter Ј

Je (Cyrillic)

Je is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It commonly represents the palatal approximant , like the pronunciation of ⟨y⟩ in "yes".-Usage:-Related letters and other similar characters:...

 is used to represent the same sound. Latin-based Slavonic writing systems such as Polish, Czech and the Latin version of Serbian and Croatian use the Latin letter J

J

Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic...

 (not the letter Y

Y

Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound...

, as in English or French) for that purpose.

Related letters and other similar characters

• И и : Cyrillic letter I
• J j : Latin letter J
  J
  Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic...
  
  
• Ј ј : Cyrillic letter Јe
• Ў ў : Cyrillic letter Short U

Computing codes

character	Й		й
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHORT I		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHORT I
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...	1049	0419	1081	0439
UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...	208 153	D0 99	208 185	D0 B9
Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...	Й	Й	й	й
KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters...  and KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,...	234	EA	202	CA
Code page 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:...	190	BE	189	BD
Code page 866 Code page 866 Code page 866 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. It is based on the "alternative character set" of GOST 19768-87...	137	89	169	A9
Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages...	201	C9	233	E9
ISO-8859-5	185	B9	217	D9
Macintosh Cyrillic	137	89	233	E9