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Soft sign
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===Digraphs===<!-- redirected from [[Аь (digraph)]] --> In certain non-Slavic Cyrillic-based alphabets, such as [[Chechen language|Chechen]], [[Ingush language|Ingush]], and various [[Dagestanian languages|Dagestanian]] languages like [[Tabasaran language|Tabasaran]], the digraph ⟨аь⟩ is introduced to represent the sounds /æ/ or /a/. This combination of the letter "а" and the soft sign "ь" denotes a specific vowel sound. Similarly, the digraph ⟨оь⟩ is used for /œ/ or /ø/, and ⟨уь⟩ for /y/. Additional iotated forms like ⟨юь⟩ and ⟨яь⟩ are used as needed. This usage of the soft sign is similar to the trailing "e" in German when umlauts are unavailable. This approach allows for the representation of specific vowel sounds in these non-Slavic languages using the available Cyrillic characters. The soft sign ⟨ь⟩, combined with other letters, creates digraphs to represent distinct phonemes that cannot be expressed by the bare letters alone. There have also been proposals to use the ⟨аь⟩ digraph in Turkic languages as a replacement for Cyrillic schwa ([[Schwa (Cyrillic)|Ә]]), which represents the sound /ə/ or /æ/. Unlike schwa, which may not be present in all Cyrillic character repertoires, both ⟨а⟩ and ⟨ь⟩ are commonly available letters in the basic modern Russian alphabet. In addition to its use with vowels, the soft sign, like the hard sign and the palochka, is employed in many languages as digraphs to represent consonant sounds that are phonetically similar but distinct from the bare letter. For example, while the letter "г" represents the sound /g/, the combination "гь" represents /ɣ/ in Crimean Tatar, /ɦ/ in Archi, and /h/ in Avar and Tabasaran.
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