Faux Cyrillic, pseudo-Cyrillic, pseudo-Russian [1] or faux Russian typography is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text, usually to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia, though it may be used in other contexts as well. It is a common Western trope used in book covers, film titles, comic book lettering, artwork for computer games, or product packaging [2] [3] which are set in or wish to evoke Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, or Russia. A typeface designed to emulate Cyrillic is classed as a mimicry typeface.
Letters are substituted regardless of phonetic matching. For example, R and N in RUSSIAN may be replaced with Cyrillic Я ("ya") and И ("i") to form the faux-cyrillic "ЯUSSIAИ" . Other examples include the use of Ш for W, Ц for U, Я/Г for R/backwards and upside-down L, Ф for O, Д for A, Б, Ь, or Ъ for B/b, З, Э, or Ё for E, Ч or У for Y. Outside the Russian alphabet, Џ (from Serbian) can act as a substitute for U, Ғ (from Turkic languages) for F, Ә (from Turkic languages, Abkhaz, Dungan, Itelmen, Kalmyk and Kurdish) or Є (from Ukrainian) for E, Ө (from Turkic, Mongolic and Uralic languages) for O, Һ (from Turkic and Mongolic languages and Kildin Sámi) for H, and Ћ (Serbian) for Th. A reversed ☭ (written as ☭) is also sometimes used for G. [4] A common substitution is $ for S.[ citation needed ] Further variants include an inverted or rotated K (ꓘ), which is not used in any alphabet except Fraser.
This effect is usually restricted to text set in all caps, because Cyrillic letter-forms do not match well with lower case Latin letters. In Cyrillic typography, most upright lower case letters resemble smaller upper case letters, unlike the more distinctive forms of Latin-alphabet type. Cursive Cyrillic upper and lower case letters are more differentiated. Most Cyrillic letter-forms were derived from the Greek alphabet in the 9th century, but the modern forms have more closely resembled those in the Latin alphabet since Peter the Great's civil script reform of 1708.
Many versions of Tetris, including those by Atari/Tengen and Spectrum Holobyte, used faux Cyrillic to spell the name as TETЯIS to emphasize the game's Russian origins.
The mockumentary film Borat used faux Cyrillic to stylize its title as BORДT (in Russian the name would be spelt БОРАТ).
Another example is American ammunition manufacturer Red Army Standard Ammunition, which is stylized as "RЭD АRMY STAИDARD".
Cyrillic letter | Latin look-alike | Actual pronunciation |
---|---|---|
Б | B, G, S, numeral 5, numeral 6 | /b/ as in boy |
В | B, ß | /v/ as in vault, /w/ as in wind (Ukrainian) |
Г | T, lowercase r, vertically mirrored L, Greek Γ | /ɡ/ as in goat, [ ɦ ]~[ ɣ ] similar to hill (Belarusian, Ukrainian) |
Д | A, O | /d/ as in door |
Ж | X, asterisk, backwards and forwards K | /ʐ/ similar to treasure |
З | E, numeral 3 | /z/ as in zoo |
И | backwards N | /i/ as in tree or [ ɪ ] as in him (Ukrainian) |
Й | N, Ñ, Ň | /j/ as in you |
К | K | /k/ as in car |
Л | A, N, J I, J Π, Greek Λ | /l/ as in love or [ ɫ ] as in coal |
Н | H | /n/ as in nose |
П | N, H (lowercase n, h), Greek Π | /p/ as in spot |
Р | P | /r/ as in rope (trilled) |
С | C | /s/ as in soup |
У | lowercase Y | /u/ as in rule |
Ф | I, O, Q, Ø, numeral 0, Greek Φ | /f/ as in fawn |
Х | X | /x/ as in Scottish English loch |
Ц | U, vertically flipped L connected | /ts/ as in cats |
Ч | Y, U, numeral 4 | /tɕ/ similar to check |
Ш | W, rotated E, upside down M | /ʂ/ similar to shrunk |
Щ | W, rotated E, vertically flipped L connected | /ɕː/ similar to wishsheep (Russian), /ʃ tʃ/ as in fresh cheese (Ukrainian and Rusyn), /ʃt/ as in schtick (Bulgarian) |
Ы | b I, vertically flipped P, letter L, numeral 6 1 | /ɨ/ similar to roses in some dialects |
Ь | lowercase b, vertically flipped P | indicates the palatalization of the previous consonant, as in union as opposed to unite |
Э | E, backwards C, numeral 3, Pan-Nigerian letter Ǝ | /ɛ/ as in echo |
Ю | I O, I-O, numeral 10 | /ju/ as in you |
Я | backwards R | /ja/ as in yard |
The letters А, В, Е, Ѕ*, І*, Ј*, К, М, Н, О, Р, С, Т, Ү*, У, Ғ*, Ѵ*, and Х (*used in other Cyrillic alphabets or from Church Slavonic) are strongly homoglyphic or related to Latin letters, depending on intended sound values to the point that their substitution may not be noticed, unlike those listed above. If compatibility issues arise that limit mixing of scripts, these can be used with faux Cyrillic letters in lieu of their Latin counterparts.
The Cyrillic script, Slavonic script or simply Slavic script is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, and used by many other minority languages.
Kazakh or Qazaq is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia by Kazakhs. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz and Karakalpak. It is the official language of Kazakhstan and a significant minority language in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, north-western China, and in the Bayan-Ölgii Province of western Mongolia. The language is also spoken by many ethnic Kazakhs throughout the former Soviet Union, Germany, and Turkey.
The Russian alphabet is the script used to write the Russian language. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, Old Slavonic. Initially an old variant of the Bulgarian alphabet, it became used in the Kievan Rusʹ since the 10th century to write what would become the modern Russian language.
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French, in which the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the first ligature and the letters ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are often merged to create ⟨fi⟩ ; the same is true of ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ to create ⟨st⟩. The common ampersand, ⟨&⟩, developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩ were combined.
Tuvan or Tyvan is a Turkic language spoken in the Republic of Tuva in South Central Siberia, Russia. The language has borrowed a great number of roots from the Mongolian language, Tibetan and the Russian languages. There are small diaspora groups of Tuvan people that speak distinct dialects of Tuvan in China and Mongolia.
Kalmyk Oirat, commonly known as the Kalmyk language, is a variety of the Oirat language, natively spoken by the Kalmyk people of Kalmykia, a federal subject of Russia. In Russia, it is the standard form of the Oirat language, which belongs to the Mongolic language family. The Kalmyk people of the Northwest Caspian Sea of Russia claim descent from the Oirats from Eurasia, who have also historically settled in Mongolia and Northwest China. According to UNESCO, the language is "Definitely endangered". According to the Russian census of 2021, there are 110,000 speakers of an ethnic population consisting of 178,000 people.
The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet is used to write the Bulgarian language. The Cyrillic alphabet was originally developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th – 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School.
Three scripts are currently used for the Tatar language: Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin.
Yeru or Eru, usually called Y in modern Russian or Yery or Ery historically and in modern Church Slavonic, is a letter in the Cyrillic script. It represents the close central unrounded vowel after non-palatalised (hard) consonants in the Belarusian and Russian alphabets, and after any consonant in most of Rusyn standards, where it represents the unrounded close-mid back unrounded vowel sound.
The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, called Old Slavonic. In the 10th century, it became used in Kievan Rus' to write Old East Slavic, from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian alphabets later evolved. The modern Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters in total: 21 consonants, 1 semivowel, 10 vowels and 1 palatalization sign. Sometimes the apostrophe (') is also included, which has a phonetic meaning and is a mandatory sign in writing, but is not considered as a letter and is not included in the alphabet.
Shor is a critically endangered Turkic language spoken by about 2,800 people in a region called Mountain Shoriya, in Kemerovo Oblast in Southwest Siberia, although the entire Shor population in this area is over 12,000 people. Presently, not all ethnic Shors speak Shor and the language suffered a decline from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. During this period the Shor language was neither written nor taught in schools. However, since the 1980s and 1990s there has been a Shor language revival. The language is now taught at the Novokuznetsk branch of the Kemerovo State University.
The Belarusian alphabet is based on the Cyrillic script and is derived from the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic. It has existed in its modern form since 1918 and has 32 letters. See also Belarusian Latin alphabet and Belarusian Arabic alphabet.
The Russian Latin alphabet is the common name for various variants of writing the Russian language by means of the Latin alphabet.
The Uzbek language has been written in various scripts: Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic. The language traditionally used Arabic script, but the official Uzbek government under the Soviet Union started to use Cyrillic in 1940, which is when widespread literacy campaigns were initiated by the Soviet government across the Union. In 1992, Latin script was officially reintroduced in Uzbekistan along with Cyrillic. In the Xinjiang region of China, some Uzbek speakers write using Cyrillic, others with an alphabet based on the Uyghur Arabic alphabet. Uzbeks of Afghanistan also write the language using Arabic script, and the Arabic Uzbek alphabet is taught at some schools.
There are 4 stages in the history of Yakut writing systems:
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.
Yo, Jo or Io is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Unicode, the letter ⟨Ё⟩ is named CYRILLIC CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER IO.
The Komi language, a Uralic language spoken in the north-eastern part of European Russia, has been written in several different alphabets. Currently, Komi writing uses letters from the Cyrillic script. There have been five distinct stages in the history of Komi writing:
Since its inception in the 18th century and up to the present, it is based on the Cyrillic alphabet to write the Udmurt language. Attempts were also made to use the Latin alphabet to write the Udmurt language. In its modern form, the Udmurt alphabet was approved in 1937.
Khakass alphabets are the alphabets used to write the Khakas language.