Yo (Cyrillic)

The jo (Ё and ё) is the seventh letter of the Russian alphabet, consisting of a Е with trema. It is pronounced as /jo/, /ʲo/, but also /ʲø/ and /o/, depending on its position in the word. Syllables containing Ё are always stressed; see also →Russian phonetics#Vowels in stressed syllables.

On October 18, 1783, one of the first meetings of the Academy of Russian Writing took place in Saint Petersburg, attended by many leading literary figures and philologists of the time. It is considered the birth of the letter Ё, after the president of the Academy Ekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova proposed it. In 1795 Ё appeared in the press for the first time. On December 24, 1942, the People's Commissar of Education ordered the compulsory use of the letter Ё in school lessons. Since 1943 Ё has been the seventh letter in the Russian alphabet.

Ё is replaced by Е especially in printed matter, which confuses especially newcomers to the Russian language and creates ambiguity in Russian names. With the exception of textbooks and dictionaries, the use of Ё in the written Russian language is not considered obligatory to this day. Some writers and publishers consistently replace it with Е, others write it in every appropriate word. For native Russian speakers, the use of Е instead of Ё does not cause difficulties in reading. In the written context, appropriate words are recognized and automatically pronounced correctly. Only in rare cases is the letter Ё necessary to clarify a correct pronunciation. These are either loan words or those Russian words in which the sequence of "е" and "ё" is meaning-distinctive, e.g.: все (all) and всё (everything).

The letter Ё and its right to exist in Russian is still highly disputed today, as evidenced by several articles in relevant journals and numerous discussion forums on the Internet.

Most other Slavic languages written in Cyrillic (for example, Bulgarian, Serbian) do not know the letter Ё; exceptions to this are Carpatho-Russian and Belarusian. However, the letter is used in numerous Cyrillic-written languages of Central Asia and the Caucasus. In most non-Russian languages that use the letter, the substitution of Ё for plain Е is illegal.

Character encoding

The two characters are included in the ISO-8859-2 character set at position 203 (uppercase "Ё") and 235 (lowercase "ё"). They are also included in the Unicode Cyrillic block at code points U+0401 (uppercase "Ё") and U+0451 (lowercase "ё").