Cyrillization of French

Russian uses phonetic transcription for the Cyrillization of its many loanwords from French. Some use is made of Cyrillic's iotation features to represent French's front rounded vowels and etymologically-softened consonants.

In the table below, the symbol ⟨ʲ⟩ represents either a "softened" consonant or the approximant /j/. When applicable, a softened consonant can be indicated in transcription either by a following iotated vowel or by ⟨ь⟩.

Doubled French consonants remain doubled in their Russian transcription: Rousseau – Руссо. Silent consonants (common in French) are generally not transcribed, except where they exist in the surface form due to liaison.

Finally, the softened consonants modify the following vowels:

Neither ⟨й⟩ nor ⟨ь⟩ are doubled.