Yu or Ju (Ю ю; italics: Ю ю) is a letter of the Cyrillic script used in East Slavic and Bulgarian alphabets. In English, Yu is commonly romanized as (or ). In turn, is used, where is available, in transcriptions of English letter (in open syllables), and also of the digraph. The sound , like in French and in German, may also be approximated by the letter . Pronunciation It is a so-called iotated vowel, pronounced in isolation as , like the pronunciation of in "human". After a consonant, no distinct sound is pronounced, but the consonant is softened. The exact pronunciation of the vowel sound of in Russian depends also on the succeeding sound because of allophony. Before a soft consonant, it is , the close central rounded vowel, as in 'rude'. Before a hard consonant or at the end of a word, the result is a back vowel , as in "new". History Apart from the form I-O, in early Slavonic manuscripts the letter appears also in a mirrored form O-I (). It is the latter form that is probably the original, precisely displaying the Greek combination omicron-iota (οι). At the time that the Greek alphabet was adapted to the Slavonic language giving rise to the Cyrillic alphabet, it denoted the close front rounded vowel in educated Greek speech. The close front rounded vowel does not appear in East Slavic. See above. There was another way for it to lead to the modern form. By the analogy to several 'iotated' letters Ѥ, ІА, Ѩ and Ѭ, the ancient ligature (or letter) Uk / possibly had its iotated form /. Also, the iotified big Yus merged itself to in East Slavic languages. Related letters and other similar characters У у : Cyrillic letter U Ү ү : Cyrillic letter Ue Û û : Latin letter U with circumflex Ū ū : Latin letter U with macron Ǔ ǔ : Latin letter U with caron Computing codes References External links Vowel letters Cyrillic ligatures