U+A656 "Ꙗ" Cyrillic Capital Letter Iotified A Unicode Character

U+A656 "Ꙗ" Cyrillic Capital Letter Iotified A is a historical glyph from the early Cyrillic alphabet, representing a ligature of the Cyrillic letters I (І) and A (А), which indicates that the vowel A is preceded by a yod or "y" sound, similar to the pronunciation of "ya" in English. This character was used primarily in Old Church Slavonic and other early Slavic manuscripts to denote the iotated vowel sound, but it has since fallen out of standard modern usage, being replaced in most contemporary Cyrillic-based writing systems by the letter Я. In Unicode, it is part of the Cyrillic Extended-B block and is primarily of interest to linguists, paleographers, and scholars studying historical Slavonic texts.