What is "faux cyrillic"

a. Of or pertaining to faux Cyrillic. n. Usage of Cyrillic letters in place of visually similar (though not necessarily phonetically similar) Roman letters in languages which use the Roman alphabet, to create a more 'Russian' feel for a text.

Faux Cyrillic, pseudo-Cyrillic, pseudo-Russian or faux Russian typography is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia.

This is a common Western trope used in book covers, film titles, comic book lettering, artwork for computer games, or product packaging 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 and more recently the logo for Sacha Baron Cohen's film Borat. In the music industry, the Simple Minds album Empires and Dance and the Spandau Ballet album Journeys to Glory, both 1981, provide examples in the cover artwork (the former with reversed Rs and Ns yielding Я and И, the latter with Д and Ф replacing A and O, respectively).

Letters are substituted regardless of phonetic matching. For example, R and N in RUSSIAN may be replaced by Cyrillic Я and И, giving "ЯUSSIAИ". Other examples include Ш for W, Ц for U, Я/ Г for R/r, 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/Bosnian) can act as a substitute for U, Ғ (USSR Turkic languages) for F, Ә (USSR Turkic languages) or Є (Ukrainian) for E, Ө (USSR Turkic languages) for O, Һ (Some USSR Turkic languages) for H, Ћ (Serbian/Bosnian) for Th and the symbol ☭ for G.

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. Cyrillic letter-forms were derived from 10th-century Greek, but the modern forms have more closely resembled those in the Latin alphabet since Peter the Great's civil script reform of 1708.