Я, the letter ya

History

Я is a letter of the Cyrillic script, and more precisely the civil script variant of the Old Cyrillic letter little yus, Ѧ. Among the modern Slavic languages it is used in the East Slavic languages and in Bulgarian, and it also belongs to the Cyrillic alphabets used for Mongolian and for many Uralic, Caucasian and Turkic languages of the former Soviet Union, so the letter turns up in records written in languages well outside Slavic.

Its modern shape arrived with a type reform. The printed Russian alphabet began to assume its modern form when Peter I introduced his civil script in 1708. That reform was not specifically orthographic in nature, but in replacing Ѧ with Я, effectively eliminating several other letters, and removing from secular usage all diacritics and accents except й, it produced for the first time a visual distinction between Russian writing and Church Slavonic writing. Arabic numerals took the place of Cyrillic numerals in the same reform.

Russian cursive is the handwritten counterpart of that same civil, or Petrine, printed script. It was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the rapid or running chancery hand of the 14th to 17th centuries, which in turn descended from the older Cyrillic bookhands, the ustav and the poluustav. Modern Cyrillic italic typefaces are based, in their lowercase part, mostly on the cursive shapes of the letters.

On a handwritten page, then, this letter will normally appear in that cursive rather than in block letters. Most handwritten Russian, in personal letters and in schoolwork alike, uses the cursive alphabet, and in Russian schools most children are taught to write in it from first grade. Unlike Latin handwriting, which ranges from fully cursive hands to hands that closely resemble printed type and where idiosyncratic mixed systems are common, it is standard practice to write Russian almost exclusively in cursive.