Its companion, the front yer (Ь, ь, italics "Ь", "ь"), now known as the "soft sign" in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian, and as "ер малък" (er malak, "small er") in Bulgarian, originally also represented a reduced vowel, more frontal than the ъ. Today, it marks the palatalization of consonants in all of the Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic script except Serbian and Macedonian, which do not use it at all, but it still leaves traces in the forms of the palatalized letters њ and љ.