Modifier Letter Cyrillic Soft Sign

It marks a weak, colourless front vowel in Lithuanian dialect transcription.

The sign fills a vowel position when the recorded sound is too weak to identify a more precise vowel quality. It describes the vowel; it does not soften the consonant before it.

Its shape belongs to the Cyrillic soft-sign family. The Old Church Slavonic writing tradition begins with 9th-century missionary writing; later Slavic spelling systems used ь for other purposes, including marking palatalization. Lithuanian dialect transcription adapted a raised soft-sign form for vowel notation.

Where did ꚝ come from?

Its documented use grew from a Lithuanian transcription tradition.

The tradition drew on the Copenhagen phonetic scheme of 1925, which Jurgis Gerulis adopted for Lithuanian dialect study in 1930. A Unicode proposal cites a 2001 printed example from North Panevėžys, àk(ꚝ)s̑. That example documents the raised form without establishing a single inventor.

Unicode accepted ꚝ in 2011 alongside its partner ꚜ and other Lithuanian dialectology characters. Encoding made the existing notation available as plain text; it did not create the notation. In this pair, ꚜ marks a weakened, colourless back vowel, contrasting with ꚝ's front vowel.

Why does ꚝ look like a tiny ь?

It is a spacing modifier based on ь, not styled text.

ꚝ occupies its own character position; it does not attach to the preceding letter as a combining mark would. Making ь smaller or raising it with formatting produces different text.

A font determines the visible outline, and specialist-character support can vary. If the glyph is missing or looks different, the underlying character remains ꚝ; a font with Cyrillic Extended-B support may display it.