In the Bulgarian language, it is only used to mark the palatalization of the preceding consonant when in front of the letter o, causing the combination ьо (/ʲo/).

(ь) The soft sign is normally written after a consonant and indicates its softening (palatalization) (for example Ukrainian батько 'father').

The feature, quite consistent with Russian orthography, promulgated a confusion between palatalization and iotation, especially because ⟨ь⟩ usually precedes so-called soft vowels.

In Slavistic transcription, which is a system used to represent Proto-Slavic language, the Cyrillic letters Ь and Ъ are employed to denote extra-short vowel sounds.

Slavistic transcription aims to reconstruct the phonological features of Proto-Slavic based on historical and comparative linguistics.

By utilizing Ь and Ъ in Slavistic transcription, linguists and researchers can indicate the presence of these extra-short vowel sounds in reconstructed Proto-Slavic words.

This transcription system allows for a more accurate representation of the phonetic and phonological characteristics of the ancestral Slavic language.

In certain non-Slavic Cyrillic-based alphabets, such as Chechen, Ingush, and various Dagestanian languages like Tabasaran, the digraph ⟨аь⟩ is introduced to represent the sounds /æ/ or /a/.

There have also been proposals to use the ⟨аь⟩ digraph in Turkic languages as a replacement for Cyrillic Schwa (Ә), which represents the sound /ə/ or /æ/.

Unlike Schwa, which may not be present in all Cyrillic character repertoires, both ⟨а⟩ and ⟨ь⟩ are commonly available letters in the basic modern Russian alphabet.

However, Cyrillic type fonts normally provide an uppercase form for setting type in all caps or for using it as an element of various serial numbers (like series of Soviet banknotes) and indices (for example, there was once a model of old Russian steam locomotives marked "Ь" – ru:Паровоз Ь).

In the romanization of Cyrillic, the soft sign is typically transliterated with U+02B9 ʹ MODIFIER LETTER PRIME.