U+A657 "ꙗ" Cyrillic Small Letter Iotified A Unicode Character

U+A657 "ꙗ" Cyrillic Small Letter Iotified A is a historical glyph from the early Cyrillic alphabet, representing a vowel sound that blends the "a" sound with a preceding "y" or "i" glide, akin to the modern pronunciation of "ya" in words like "yard." Part of the Cyrillic Extended-B block, this character was used primarily in Old Church Slavonic and other ancient Slavic manuscripts to denote a specific phonetic variant that has largely fallen out of use in contemporary Cyrillic scripts. It is the lowercase counterpart of the uppercase iotified A (U+A656 Ꙗ), and its inclusion in Unicode reflects efforts to preserve and digitally encode rare historical writing systems for scholarly and linguistic purposes.

General Properties

Code Point	U+A657
Version Added	5.1
Name	Cyrillic Small Letter Iotified A
Block	Cyrillic Extended-B
General Category	Lowercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	ꙗ
HTML Hex Encoding	ꙗ
UTF-8 Encoding	0xEA 0x99 0x97
UTF-16 Encoding	0xA657
UTF-32 Encoding	0x0000A657
C/C++/Java Escape	\ua657

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
NFKC Quick Check	Yes
NFKD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Alphabetic
Lowercase	Yes
Simple Uppercase Code Point	"Ꙗ" U+A656 Cyrillic Capital Letter Iotified A
Simple Titlecase Code Point	"Ꙗ" U+A656 Cyrillic Capital Letter Iotified A
Uppercase Code Point	"Ꙗ" U+A656 Cyrillic Capital Letter Iotified A
Titlecase Code Point	"Ꙗ" U+A656 Cyrillic Capital Letter Iotified A
Cased	Yes
Changes When Casemapped	Yes
Changes When Titlecased	Yes
Changes When Uppercased	Yes
Script	Cyrillic
Script Extensions	Cyrillic
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
ID Start	Yes
XID Start	Yes
ID Continue	Yes
XID Continue	Yes
Alphabetic	Yes
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Base	Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Alphabetic letter
Sentence Break	Lower