Yat
thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet
Yat or jat (Ѣ ѣ; italics: Ѣ ѣ) is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet.
There is also another version of yat, the iotated yat (majuscule: ⟨Ꙓ⟩, minuscule: ⟨ꙓ⟩), which is a Cyrillic character combining a decimal I and a yat. There was no numerical value for this letter and it was not in the Glagolitic alphabet. It is encoded in Unicode 5.1 at positions U+A652 and U+A653.
Usage
Yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel, usually notated as ⟨ě⟩. It is generally believed to have represented the sound /æ/ or /ɛ/, like the pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ in "cat" or ⟨e⟩ in "bet", respectively, which was a reflex of earlier Proto-Slavic */ē/ and */aj/. The sound represented by yat developed late in the history of Common Slavic, which is significant for its role in the Slavic second palatalization of the Slavic velar consonants.
The Glagolitic alphabet contained only one letter for both yat ⟨ѣ⟩ and the Cyrillic iotated a ⟨ꙗ⟩. According to Kiril Mirchev, this meant that ⟨a⟩ after ⟨i⟩ in the Thessaloniki dialect (which served as a basis for Old Church Slavonic) mutated into a wide vowel that resembled or was the same as yat (/æ/).
To this day, the most archaic Bulgarian dialects, i.e., the Rup and Moesian dialects feature a similar phonetic change where /a/ after iota and the formerly palatal consonants ⟨ж⟩ (/ʒ/), ⟨ш⟩ (/ʃ/) and ⟨ч⟩ (/t͡ʃ/) becomes /æ/, e.g.
The public source identifies “Yat” as thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around thirty-second, letter and Cyrillic.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q331368. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.