Unit 1 - The alphabet

1.8 - The soft vowels

In addition to the hard vowels presented on page 1.6, Ukrainian also has soft (sometimes known as "iotated") vowels. They consist (roughly) of a "y" sound, as in "yellow", followed by a hard vowel. Click on a letter to hear how it sounds.

	[й + е]
	[й + і]
	[й + у]
	[й + а]

Here are some words beginning with these vowels.

	Ємен - Yemen
	їдиш (also ідиш) - Yiddish
	Юкон - Yukon
	Ялта - Yalta

Two of the above vowels are also words in their own right:

я means I (me)
є is the present tense of the verb "to be", meaning am/is/are.

	There isn't a single letter for the iotated о. This is spelt йо, or sometimes ьо, depending on the letter it follows.
	Example: Йордан – Jordan, йой – oh!

There is no iotated vowel derived from и.