Я

The Я ( lowercase я ) is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet . The pronunciation is / ja / or / a / after palatalized consonants.

It originated from two early Cyrillic letters: the jotized A (Ꙗ and minuscule ꙗ, a ligature made up of І and А) and the small jus (Ѧ). In East Slavonic the phonetic difference between the two letters was lost, which is why a round Ѧ without a middle leg was often used in East Slavic in the Cyrillic italics to represent the sound.

When Peter I reformed the bourgeois script , he adapted the changed Jus to the Romance script style, which gave the Я its current appearance.

Although the Cyrillic letter Я looks like a mirror image of the Latin R , it is not related phonetically or historically.

The toy retailer Toys "R" Us , the metal band Korn and the internet star Fred use a mirrored R in their logos, which looks like the Cyrillic letter but is pronounced as / ɹ / .

Character encoding

default		Uppercase Я	Minuscule я
Unicode	Codepoint	U + 042F	U + 044F
	Surname	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER YA	CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER YA
UTF-8		D0 AF	D1 8F
XML / XHTML	decimal	Я	я
	hexadecimal	Я	я