Yi (Cyrillic)

Yi (Ї ї; italics: Ї ї) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

It represents the iotated vowel sound /ji/, like the pronunciation of ⟨yea⟩ in "yeast". It is used in the Ukrainian alphabets.

In various romanization systems, ї is represented by Roman ji, yi, i, or even ï, but the most common is yi.

It was formerly also used in the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet in the late 1700s and early 1800s, where it represented the sound /j/; in this capacity, it was introduced by Dositej Obradović but eventually replaced with the modern letter ј by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić.

In Ukrainian, the letter was introduced as part of the Zhelekhivka orthography, in Yevhen Zhelekhivsky's Ukrainian–German dictionary (2 volumes, 1885–6).