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Cyrillic letter Soft Sign
Unicode (hex)
majuscule: U+042C
minuscule: U+044C
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

The soft sign (Ь, ь) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short front vowel but in modern Slavic Cyrillic writing systems (all East-Slavic plus Bulgarian and Church Slavic), it does not represent an individual sound, rather it indicates softening (palatalization) of the preceding consonant or (less commonly) just has a traditional orthographic usage with no phonetic meaning (like Russian туш 'flourish after a toast' and тушь 'India ink', both pronounced [tuʂ], but different in grammatical gender and declension). Also, it has a function of "separation sign": in Russian, vowels after the soft sign are pronounced separately from the previous consonant and are iotated (compare Russian льют [lʲjut] '(they) pour/cast' and лют [lʲut] '(he is) fierce'). That is, the soft sign is functionally rather a modifier of the neighboring letters than a real letter itself.

Unlike the regular yer, or "hard sign" in Russian, the separation performed by the soft sign is only partial, meaning that it changes the sound of both the letters before and after it. This is why in Russian it is more orthographically correct to write подъезд ('the porch'), than подезд, to indicate /dje/.

Among Slavic languages, the soft sign has the most limited use in Bulgarian: since 1945, the only possible position is one between consonants and <о> (for example, in names Жельо, Кръстьо, and Гьончо).

The Cyrillic variant of the Serbo-Croatian language (Vukovica) has had no soft sign since the mid-19th century: palatalization is represented by special consonant letters instead of this sign (some of these letters, such as Њ or Љ, were designed as ligatures with the soft sign). The modern Macedonian writing system, created in 1944 and based on the Serbo-Croatian variant, has had no soft sign from the very beginning.

Under normal orthographic rules, it has no uppercase form as no word begins with this letter. However, Cyrillic type fonts do normally provide an uppercase form for setting type in all caps, or for using it as element of various serial numbers (like series of Soviet banknotes) and indices (for example, there existed model of Old Russian steam locomotives marked "Ь").

In the romanization of Cyrillic words, soft signs are typically replaced with the prime symbol (or, alternatively, apostrophe) or just ignored (especially in the final position: Тверь=Tver, Обь=Ob etc.).

[edit] Name of the letter

• Old Church Slavonic: ѥрь (yerĭ)—meaning of the word is unknown
• Church Slavonic: єрь (yer')
• Bulgarian: ер малък [er ˈma.lək] ('small yer'), whereas the hard sign is named ер голям ('big yer')
• Russian: мягкий знак [ˈmʲax.kʲɪj znak] ('soft sign'), or (an archaic, mostly pre-1917 name) ерь [jerʲ]
• Ukrainian: м’який знак [mja.ˈkɪj znak] ('soft sign')
• Belarusian: мяккі знак [mʲak.kʲi znak] ('soft sign')
• Serbocroatian (and all its variants): tanko jer/танко јер ('thin yer'), or simply jer/јер ('yer')—whereas the hard sign is named debelo jer/дебело јер ('thick yer') or simply jor/јор ('yor')

[edit] See also

Look up ь in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Ъ (yer or hard sign)
• iotation
• Ы (yery), Љ (lje) and Њ (nje)—ligatures with soft sign
• Ҍ (semisoft sign), graphically identical to Ѣ (Yat)

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