Faux Cyrillic - Definition and Overview

Graphic designers sometimes employ faux Cyrillic typography to give a Slavic feel to English text, by replacing Latin letters with Cyrillic letters resembling them. A simple way to accomplish this is to replace capital letters R and N with Cyrillic Я and И, for some "Яussiaи flavour". Other examples include Ш for W, Ц for U, Ф for O and Ч or У for Y.

This is a common Western trope used in book covers, film titles, comic book lettering, and artwork for computer games which are set in the Soviet Union or Russian Federation. An early example was the logo for Norman Jewison's film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. Other examples are the computer game Tetris and the fanzine Apparatchik.

It should be noted that none of the Cyrillic characters above are pronounced the same way as their Roman "look-alikes": for example, in Russian, Я is pronounced /ja/; И, /i/; Ш, /ʃ/; Ц, /ʦ/; Ф, /f/; Ч, /ʧ/; and У, /u/.

See also

• Foreign branding
• Volapük encoding, an informal rendering of Cyrillic text over Latin-alphabet ASCII.

Example Usage of Cyrillic