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Graphic designers sometimes employ faux Cyrillic typography to give a Soviet or Russian feel to text, by replacing Latin letters with Cyrillic letters resembling them in appearance. A simple way to accomplish this is to replace capital letters R and N with Cyrillic Я and И for some "ЯUSSIAИ flavor". Other examples include Ш for W, Ц for U, Г for r, Ф for O, Д for A, and Ч or У for Y.

This effect is usually restricted to text set in all caps, because Cyrillic letter-forms don't match well with lower case Latin letters.^[1]

This is a common Western trope used in book covers, film titles, comic book lettering, and artwork for computer games which are set in or wish to evoke Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Federation. An early example was the logo for Norman Jewison's film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming; more are listed below.

Not all examples of typography with mirror-imaged Latin characters are Faux Cyrillic. For example, Toys Я Us and KoЯn use a backwards letter R, in the former to embody childlike innocence, in the latter to evoke an ironically grim crudeness. The "NIИ" wordmark of Nine Inch Nails uses a backwards N to create a formalistic symmetry.

The Cyrillic characters below are not pronounced the same way as their Roman lookalikes:

Cyrillic letter	Latin look-alike	Actual Russian pronunciation
Я	R	/ja/ as in "yard"
И	N	/i/ as in "information"
Ш	W	/ʃ/ as in "ship"
Ц	U	/ʦ/ as in "cats"
Ф	O	/f/ as in "fox"
Д	A	/d/ as in "day"
Ч	Y	/ʧ/ as in "check"
У	Y	/u/ as in "bull"
Г	L	/g/ as in "goat"

Contents 1 Examples of faux Cyrillic 2 "Real" Cyrillic written with Latin typefaces 3 Notes 4 See also 5 External link

• The videogame TETЯIS
• APPAЯATCHIK, a fanzine.
• Paul McCartney's name as it appeared on the cover artwork for the album CHOBA B CCCP (PAUL McCARTИEЧ)
• LЭИIИGЯAD COWBOYS, a Finnish, but "fake Russian" band, spelled with varying amounts of faux Cyrillic.
• Poster art in the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The title of the film on movie posters is spelled BORДT. The Д resembles the capital letter A although in reality, Д makes a D sound.

Further information: List of examples of faux Cyrillic typography

The practice (often as a wordgame) of creating readable Russian words by using strictly Latin letters plus numerals in place of their Cyrillic lookalikes might be considered the inverse of the "faux Cyrillic" phenomenon.

Latin letter or numeral	Cyrillic letter it represents	Russian pronunciation
A	A	/a/ as in "all"
6	Б	/b/ as in "boy"
B	В	/v/ as in "vitamin"
E	Е	/je/ as in "yesterday"
3	З or Э	/z/ as in "zoo" or /ɛ/ as in "echo"
K	К	/k/ as in "keep"
M	М	/m/ as in "many"
H	Н	/n/ as in "never"
O or 0	О	/ʊə/ as in "ordinary"
P	Р	/r/ as in "radish"
C	С	/s/ as in "sea"
T	Т	/t/ as in "tuna"
Y	У	/u/ as in "oops"
X	Х	/x/ as in Spanish "jalapeño"
I 0	Ю	/ju/ as in "youth"

The title of Paul McCartney's album given in the previous section, CHOBA B CCCP, is one such example. If the letters are taken to be Latin, the title is meaningless (what is a "choba"?), but if interpreted as Cyrillic, it spells the Russian phrase снова в СССР -- to be read aloud as snova vess-ess-ess-air and intended to translate the song title "Back in the USSR."

In North America, some Russian-speaking car owners have devised personalized license plates -- also known as "vanity plates" or "vanity tags" -- that spell out words or phrases in Cyrillic using only Latin letters plus a few numerals.

The U.S. state-issued vanity plate below can be understood as знаю (znaju), a first-person singular verb meaning "I know." The plate below it appears to be a non-valid "novelty" plate resembling the style of Russian license plates but not actually issued by the Russian government; it is presumably meant to be read as "I am the 007 of the Cheka."

This vanity tag may be interpreted as the Russian word совенок (sovjonok) -- a diminutive form of сова (sova), "owl," and thus translatable as "baby owl."

For illustrative purposes, a short and by no means exhaustive list of "Cyrillic" words or phrases that can be generated with a standard ASCII keyboard, or in some cases with standard Scrabble tiles:

• BOT OHA (вот она, vot ona, "there she [is]")
• KOT (кот, kot, "tomcat")
• KOPOBA ECT CO6AKY (корова ест собаку, korova jest sobaku, "the cow is eating the dog")
• 3HAI0 (знаю, znaju, "[I] know")
• OH CMEET (он смеет, on smejet, "he dares")
• CMEX (смех, smex, "laughter")
• XAMCTBO (хамство, xamstvo, "crude boorishness," from the Biblical name "Ham")
• COBEHOK (совенок, sovjonok, "baby owl"; diminutive of сова, sova, "owl")
• B HATYPE (в натуре, v nature, "in nature")
• AHHA AXMATOBA (анна аxматова, Anna Akhmatova, Russian poet)
• EPEBAH (ереван), Yerevan, capital of Armenia)

As illustrated in the photos above, some of these examples have been spotted as actual license plates in the U.S.; others are provided as hypothetical constructions. Although the examples in the photos were obviously deliberate creations for which the car owner paid extra money, it sometimes happens that the random combinations of letters on standard-issue license plates are by chance readable as Cyrillic. For instance, in the Washington D.C. area, it's common to see standard license plates beginning with such letter combinations as XYU and XYN -- which are visually suggestive of the obscene Russian word хуй (xuj), translatable as "cock" or "dick." In some states there are laws that prohibit obscenities and other offensive language in "vanity" license plates, and special multilanguage teams monitor the issuance of plates with non-standard licence numbers.

1. ^ 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. Cyrillic letter-forms are originally derived from tenth-century Greek manuscript, but the modern forms more closely resemble Latin since Peter the Great's civil script reform of 1708.

• Foreign branding
• Heavy metal umlaut for a similar practice in the field of heavy metal
• Greek sigmas (Σ) can be employed as the capital Roman E, for instance in the RCA brand name Erato was written Σrato in the logo.
• Volapük encoding, an informal rendering of Cyrillic text over Latin-alphabet ASCII.
• Engrish
• Cyrillic

• Fake Cyrillic Generator - Converts Latin text to faux Cyrillic.