Short I (Й, й) is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И (which resembles reversed Latin capital N), with a breve.

It is the eleventh letter in the Russian alphabet, and in Russian is called И краткое (I kratkoye or "short I").

It is the tenth letter in the Bulgarian alphabet and is called И кратко (I kratko or "short I") in that Bulgarian. It is the fourteenth letter in the Ukrainian alphabet, and in Ukrainian is called Йот, (Yot) or Ий (Yi, pronounced ). It is also the eleventh letter of the Belarusian alphabet, however the letter И is not used in Belarusian.

Short I represents the semivowel as in English yellow, but appears predominantly in the form of diphthongs like in широкий (wide) in айсберг (iceberg), in долей (portion), in горой (mountain), and in буйство (violence). It is transliterated as j, y, or i depending on which romanization system is used. See Transliteration of Russian into English and Romanization of Ukrainian.

Active use of the letter Й (or, rather, the breve over И) began in the 15-16th centuries. Since the middle of the 17th century, the differentiation between И and Й has become obligatory in the Russian variant of Church-Slavonic orthography (used for the Russian language as well). During the alphabet reforms of Peter I, all diacritical marks were removed from the Russian writing system, but shortly after his death (1735) the distinction between И and Й was restored. Й was not officially considered a separate letter of the alphabet until the 1930s.

In Serbian and Macedonian, letter Ј is used to represent the same sound.

Code positions

Its HTML entities are: Й or Й for capital and й or й for small letter.

See also

• И
• Ј
• Ў

Vowel letters

Й (lizherenn) | Й (Cirillico) | Й | Й | I curta (Cirílico) | Й (кириллица) | Й | Й