Faux Cyrillic

Faux Cyrillic, pseudo-Cyrillic, pseudo-Russian[1] or faux Russian typography is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text, usually to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia, though it may be used in other contexts as well. It is a common Western trope used in book covers, film titles, comic book lettering, artwork for computer games, or product packaging[2][3] which are set in or wish to evoke Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Federation. A typeface designed to emulate Cyrillic is classed as an ethnic typeface. The use of faux Cyrillic is sometimes considered offensive for Russian speakers.[4]

A faux Russian T-shirt print reads "ШЗ́ДЯ" (WEAR). A Russian-speaker would read this as "shzdja ", a word that does not exist in the language. Moreover, the accent over the letter З never occurs in Russian, although it is a Cyrillic letter.

Letters are substituted regardless of phonetic matching. For example, R and N in RUSSIAN may be replaced by Cyrillic Я and И to form the faux-cyrillic "ЯUSSIAИ" ("RUSSIAN"). Other examples include the use of Ш for W, Ц for U, Я/Г for R/backwards and upside-down L, Ф for O, Д for A, Б, Ь, or Ъ for B/b, З, Э, or Ё for E, Ч or У for Y. Outside the Russian alphabet, Џ (Serbian) can act as a substitute for U, Ғ (USSR Turkic languages) for F, Ә (USSR Turkic languages, Abkhaz, Dungan, Itelmen, Kalmyk and Kurdish) or Є (Ukrainian) for E, Ө (USSR Turkic, Mongolic and Uralic languages) for O, Һ (USSR Turkic and Mongolic languages and Kildin Sámi) for H, and Ћ (Serbian) for Th. A reversed ☭ is also sometimes used for G.[5] A common substitution is $ for S. Further variants include an inverted K (ꓘ), which does not occur in any language.

This effect is usually restricted to text set in all caps, because Cyrillic letter-forms do not match well with lower case Latin letters. In Cyrillic typography, most upright lower case letters resemble smaller upper case letters, unlike the more distinctive forms of Latin-alphabet type. Cursive Cyrillic upper and lower case letters are more differentiated. Most Cyrillic letter-forms were derived from the Greek alphabet in the 9th century, but the modern forms have more closely resembled those in the Latin alphabet since Peter the Great's civil script reform of 1708.