The
soft sign (
Ь,
ь, italics
Ь, ь; Russian: мягкий знак ) also known as the
front yer or
front er, is a letter of the
Cyrillic script. In
Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short (or "reduced") front vowel. As with its companion, the
back yer ‹ъ›, the vowel
phoneme that it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels.