Latin Small Letter Y y

Latin Small Letter Y y. Such lowercase Latin letters appeared in the Middle Ages and derived from the minuscule script. It's a style of writing characterized by small and rounded letters, which were designed to be written quickly and efficiently by scribes. Miniscule scripts would come in handy when it was necessary to save money on expensive parchment.

In the Cyrillic script the situation was a bit different. People used other ways to save space there. They would write letters above letters and pick cheaper materials like birch bark. Minuscule letters were not widely used there, which is why, for example, Russian writing seemed to consist only of capital letters. As for people from other relative cultures, Bulgarians and Serbs borrowed some typographic traditions from the West, so their script is closer to the Latin script.

The symbol “Latin Small Letter Y” is included in the “Lowercase Latin alphabet” subblock of the “Basic Latin” block and was approved as part of Unicode version 1.1 in 1993.