Yo (Cyrillic)

Yo (Ё, ё) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet used only in Russian language whose 7th letter it is.

It has been introduced along with the Russian orthography reform of 1708 by Peter I who presented the reformed orthography as the "civil script".

It is spoken as an palatalized O ("yo") but when following a postalveolar fricative, like ж, ч, ш and щ, Yo will lose its palatalizing function being just pronounced as an O.

It is said that the letter Yo is disappearing in printed language and replaced by the letter Ye looking the same like Yo expect that Yo's diaeresis is missing on it, anyway it still has to be learned by Russian schoolchildren and is still used in handwritten language.

The fact that Yo is slowly replaced by Ye in printed language makes some confusion to non-Russians as it makes Russian words and names harder to transcript in order to transport them into languages not writing Cyrillic. E. g. many Russian surnames end with -ев(-ev) or -ёв(-ov) and two leaders of the former Soviet Union have been transcripted to Khrushchev and Gorbachev though their surnames end with -ёв and replacing the -ev endings by -ov endings would be sensible to secure phonetic accuracy.

Cyrillic alphabet
А A;	Б Be;	В Ve;	Г Ge;	Ѓ Gje;	Ґ Ghe;	Д De;	Ђ Dje;	Е E;	Є Ukranian E;	Ѐ E with grave;	Ё Yo;	Ж Zhe;
Ѕ Dze;	З Ze;	И I;	Й I short;	Ѝ I with grave;	І Ukrainian I;	Ї Yi;	Ј Je;	К Ka;	Ќ Kje;	Ћ Tshe;	Л El;	Љ Lje;
М Em;	Н En;	Њ Nje;	О O;	П Pe;	Р Er;	С Es;	Т Te;	Ѹ Ou;	У U;	Ў U short;	Ф Ef;	Х Ha;
Ѡ Omega Cyrillic;	Ц Tse;	Ч Che;	Џ Dzhe;	Ш Sha;	Щ Shcha;	Ъ Hard sign (yer);	Ы Yery;	Ь Soft sign;	Ѣ Yat;	Э E reversed;	Ю Yu;	Я Ya
(not in Unicode) A iotified	Ѥ E iotified;	Ѧ [[Yus; small]]	Ѫ [[Yus; big]]	Ѩ [[Yus; small iotified]]	Ѭ [[Yus; big iotified]]	Ѯ Ksi Cyrillic;	Ѱ Psi Cyrillic;	Ѳ Fita;	Ѵ Izhitsa;	Ѷ Izhitsa with double grave;

(Russian letters bolded; old letters italics)