Ukrainian and Rusyn

In Ukrainian and Rusyn, Є/є represents the sound combination /je/ or the vowel sound /e/ after a palatalized consonant.

It is the 8th letter of Ukrainian alphabet (in 1935-1992 it was the 7th, as Ґ was banned).

Khanty

In Khanty, the letter represents the sound /je/.

Old Serbian

In old Serbian orthography, Є/є represented same sounds as in Ukrainian and Rusyn: the sound combination /je/ or the vowel sound /e/ after a palatalized consonant.

The letter was eliminated in Vuk Karadžić's alphabet and replaced by digraph је.

Old Slavonic, Old East Slavic

In the oldest Slavonic manuscripts, Є was just a graphical variant of Е and thus represents /e/ without palatalization. Later Є replaced Ѥ (i.e. denotes /ʲe/ after consonants and /je/ after vowels and in an initial position). Later on, it also accepted both a decorative role (as an initial letter of a word, even if there was no iotation) and an orthographical role, to make the distinction between certain homonymical forms (mostly between plural and singular).

New Church Slavonic

Since the mid-17th century, the Church Slavonic orthography has the following main rules related to the usage of shapes Є and Е:

• in an initial position, always use Є;
• otherwise, use Е with the following exceptions:
  • in noun's endings, use -євъ and -ємъ for plural and -евъ, -емъ for singular;
  • in other endings, suffixes and roots of nouns, adjectives, participles, numerals and pronouns, use Є for plural/dual, if there exists a homonymous form in the singular (either of the same word or a different one; the actual rule is much more complicated and not well-defined, as there are multiple other ways to eliminate such homonymy);
  • publishers from Kyiv also use Є in the genitive case of three pronouns (менє, тебє, себє), and Е in the accusative case (мене, тебе, себе);
• as a numerical sign (with value 5) use Є, not Е (the rule has often been ignored outside of the Russian Empire).

In the modern Church Slavonic alphabet, the 6th letter is typically shown as Єєе (one uppercase accompanied with two variants of lowercase).

The different shapes Є and Е exist only in lowercase; thus in all caps and small caps styles, the distinction between Є and Е disappears.

Old Believers print their books using an older variant of New Church Slavonic language. Its orthography combines the fully formal system described above with the older tradition to use Є phonetically (after vowels, to represent iotated /je/).

Similar characters

The United States Federal Geographic Data Committee uses Ꞓ, a character similar to capital Є, to represent the Cambrian Period in geologic history.^[1]

Є is similar to the symbol for the euro currency ⟨€⟩.