In the specimens of the civil script produced for Peter I, forms of and я were grouped together; Peter removed the first two, leaving only я in the modern alphabet, and its use in Russian remains the same to the present day. It was similarly adopted for the standardised orthographies of modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, both Old Cyrillic and civil scripts were used for printing, with я in the latter corresponding to in the former, and there were various attempts to standardise the orthography, of which some, such as the Plovdiv school exemplified by Nayden Gerov, were more conservative, essentially preserving the Middle Bulgarian distribution of the letter, others attempted to rationalise spelling on more phonetic principles, and one project in 1893 proposed abolishing the letter я altogether.Любомир Андрейчин, Из историята на нашето езиково строителство, София, 1977, pp.151–165 By the early twentieth century, under Russian influence, я came to be used for (which is not a reflex of ę in Bulgarian), retaining its use for but was no longer used for other purposes; this is its function today.
