Cyrillic characters displaying differently

[CarliHyland]

I wonder if anyone here might have an insight into why this occurs:

I am laying up type in the cyrillic alphabet and I am getting different characters depending on the font I use. As you can see in the attached screen shot, Helvetica Neue (lower) displays the й properly, but Ropa Soft (upper) shows it as a 'u' with lower half circle on top. 

My initial thought was that it had something to do with the case, which does correct the characters. But then I am left with the whole phrase in upper case, as opposed to the 'semi upper and lower case' as helvetica shows (in latin terms). 

Any ideas are much appreciated! Thanks :)

[Riccardo Sartori]

It’s simply a stylistic variant of the lowercase |и|, modelled after the italic form, much like our single-storey |a|.

I’m not a reader of any language written in Cyrillic, so I can’t say how common or unusual it is.

[Riccardo Sartori]

For what I can recall, Bulgarian Cyrillic tends to use a number of letterforms modelled after italics. And Ropa’s designer was indeed born in Bulgaria.

I remember someone complaining that these variants aren’t really historical, but rather the fancy of some foundry, which gained political traction.

[CarliHyland]

Thanks for the info Riccardo, very insightful and interesting to now go hunting for more! Cheers 

[petrushka]

In handwriting this character is more like a Latin "u". This particular font uses the handwriting convention rather than the typographic one, but it is the same character as the one that looks like a backward "N". You find it more often in italic fonts, but it is perfectly ok, not a coding error.

[Riccardo Sartori]

More on Bulgarian Cyrillic​.