@Liggliluff  
I quite like that theory. :) I’m reminded of another real-world example, similar to your Hungarian example, probably from the Far East, but unfortunately it skips my mind. But as I say - I like the thinking.

@RAF Flütersloh  
There can be that “yak” could be a word for something like “X of kind”, and a word for their own people. So “yak-yak-istan” can be “the land of the yak kind”.
 
For example in Hungarian, “magyarul” means “in Hungarian”. – “Hogy van ez magyarul?”, “How do you say that in Hungarian?” – But it can also be a clarification – “Nem tartották be az ígéretüket. Magyarul hazudtak”, “They did not keep their promise. That is, they lied”

I think Yakistan may have sounded too close to Pakistan, and perhaps they wanted to go with something more unique, though it probably had more to do with Yakyakistan sounding more jovial. Technically speaking, though, it does make the country’s name mean “Land of the Yakyaks”…
 
My personal guess is that they’re mostly modelled visually after yaks you’d find around Nepal. That said, probably shouldn’t read too much into it, as the character names are a hotchpotch of culture and the accents could hardly be more generic. The name Rutherford seems wholly unrelated to anything outside Anglophone/Scottish heritage and Yona is (according to Wikipedia) a Pali word describing people who speak Greek, or a common derivative of the name “Jonah” in Israel.
 
But, the same page did reveal that there is a (tiny) place in Russia called Yona! :D And it is spelt Ёна.  
Full circle again, yay!

@Background Pony #D8FB  
I haven’t found any proper answer. But I guess it’s Russia and the countries below.
 
The name Yakyakistan is probably based on Tajikistan or Kazakhstan. Or they just repeated “yak” and added “-istan” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So yaks are supposed to be Russian in my little pony?

@Liggliluff  
You’ve definitely got me on the logic or illogical side of things - as I said in the original post, talk of coding and whatnot leaves me befuddled at the best of times. I read up some more discussions on a reddit board concerning the Russian language. Interesting stuff, going on about the history of ё as the most recently added character, the fact that it follows German umlaut forms because, well, Catherine II introduced it, but also because introducing an entirely new character would have been too expensive. But the general consensus is that it really is not obsolete, it’s just not popular.
 
But the consensus also agrees, there’s nothing stopping people today using ё (it is out of the way on the keyboard but you don’t actually have to use a modifier AFIAK) except laziness and custom. One thing that won’t help that is that you really do need to use a modifier to get ё on an iPhone keyboard, for instance. You need to press e and hold it down in order to get ё. Can’t be good.

@RAF Flütersloh  
Their reasoning is illogical to only use 32 letters instead of 33. Sure, their letters would fit neatly into 4×8 characters, but that has no benefit. English has 26 letters, that is 2 over 24 (3×8) and “unnecessary” letters like W or V wasn’t cut.
 
In English, 6 special characters were added between the capitals and lowercase to make both have the same initial bits. The same could have been done in Russian, but having 7 characters instead. It would just reorder things, but it wouldn’t change the amount of characters. – They still encoded Ё in several code pages, they just misplaced it. Other languages using Cyrillic had to have their own sorting algorithms anyway, but I guess Russian is such a big language it benefited from not having an extra code. Which argues for adding Ё anyway.
 
But nowadays it has wide support, including proper sorting. However, the Ё is put away in the corner of the keyboard, requiring a modifier to access. So I could see why Russians can’t bother typing it most of the case, and typing йо is two letters instead of one.

@Liggliluff  
You’re thinking about it much more logically than I am, so I’ll quote Wikipedia:
 
“The advent of the computer has had a great influence on the process of substitution ⟨ё⟩ with ⟨е⟩ for a counterintuitive reason: currently, the Russian alphabet contains 33 letters including ⟨ё⟩, and codepage designers usually prefer to omit ⟨ё⟩ so that all Russian letters can be placed into sections of 16 letters (16, like other powers of 2, is often preferred in computing over other numbers). Some examples are pre-Unicode character pages 866 for Microsoft DOS and 1251 for Microsoft Windows. Since in both cases, ⟨ё⟩ was placed outside its alphabetically correct position, it made text sorting more complex. Software developers would then choose to substitute all ⟨ё⟩ letters with ⟨е⟩ at an early stage of text processing to simplify later stages.”
 
As I say - doesn’t make a huge sense to me. But I don’t think it’s such a case of replacing ё with е, it’s more akin to writing e regardless and not bothering to add the dots, and assuming everyone will know what you’re getting at.
 
Stresses also play a key part in pronouncing Russian words and names. For instance Новосмолеская from the sign above - only one of those “o”s will have the /o/ sound. Which one? I don’t know (I guess the third one though). Sometimes stresses are written, usually for the benefit of academics or non-native speakers, but Russians commonly won’t mark them, and assume every reader will know the correct stress already. Case in point: замок and замок. Two different pronunciations, two different meanings, depending entirely on where you use the stress.
 
Though, that said, explaining the differences between замок and замок is a lot simpler than when I was trying to explain to students why bow and bow are different and when one should be used and not the other - and while we’re talking about boats, how about row and row?
 
I think it’s just a case of saving time and complexity. Or in other words, Russians being lazy - but they’re far from being the only ones.

@RAF Flütersloh  
Cyrillic character order in Unicode:  
@Ѐ Ё Ђ Ѓ Є Ѕ І Ї Ј Љ Њ Ћ Ќ Ѝ Ў Џ  
А Б В Г Д Е Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П  
Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я@  
So sure, if Russian gets rid of Ё, it will only use the characters from line 2 and 3. Other Cyrillic languages will still use characters from the first line.
 
Having 32 letters over 33 really doesn’t get any software benefits. Not even in compression or the like, because you also need space, period, comma and more that pushes the number above 32 anyway. – Maybe there’s a niche situation where having 32 letters is beneficial.
 
But why replace ё with е when йо or ьо would be better? That just reminds me of the stupid Hungarian decision; they have the letter Ly and J making the same sound (/j/), and lyuk /juk/ is the only word starting with Ly, so they changed the spelling to luk /luk/ instead of juk /juk/.

@Background Pony Number 17  
I was interested by that so had a look at Wikipedia. You are right - it seems Ё is becoming less popular to use, seemingly because it’s just so awkward. Wikipedia cites examples where occasions that have ё discrepancies on legal documents - i.e. one document has the name Горбачёв and the other Горбачев - is enough to cause people to lose benefits and entitlements. It’s also awkward for software developers to use, both in terms of sorting (because apparently computer codes place it way out of its correct alphabetic order) and because they’d rather have 32 Russian letters for the power of 2 or something, rather than the true 33. (My lack of coding skills doesn’t make that in any way understandable to me)
 
It’s also long been the case that Russians tend to omit writing ё except when it’s vitally important - i.e. всё (everything) and все (everyone) - and then trust everyone to know when to pronounce it. There is some official guidance that implies everyone should use ё in Proper Nouns, and then there are some linguists who insist on using it everywhere to assist non-native speakers (which is why I’m used to seeing ё and was surprised to hear it becoming obsolete)  
But even with its unpopularity, I think, using Горбачёв as an example, it’s just going to be simply written as Горбачев, with folk remembering to say “chyov” at the end, before it’s going to be written as Горбачйов.
 
However, while I was looking into it further on Wikipedia, I actually found the solution to the question.
 
While Ёна would absolutely be the most accurate-sounding transliteration of Yona, it’s simply common practice when translating foreign “Yo” sounds into Russian to use Йо. Case in point: New York is written Ныо-Йорк rather than Ныо-Ёрк.
 
As I kept mentioning, this was from Wikipedia, so take from that what you will, and I’m sure there are more knowledgeable Russian speakers out there that could correct me, but that seems to be the most likely outcome. :)
 
tl;dr - If Yona was Russian she would be called Ёна but she’s called Йона on the Russian wiki because her name is foreign.

@Background Pony Number 17  
Although with that argument, they should stop using Е in favour of Йэ, Ю to Йу, Я to Йа ;)

@CalypsoFantasy  
Ёна should be the proper spelling, from what little Russian I learned in college. But I’ve been told Ё is becoming obsolete, so maybe they’re starting to use Йо in its place?

@CalypsoFantasy  
Јона could be the Serbian spelling, as Serbian uses Ј for /j/, and lacks Й and Ё.

Йона is the spelling used on the Russian wiki, but if you insist on somewhat retaining the original English spelling, I’d recommend Ёна.

Her name in Cyrillic: Йона / Ёна / Јона

@CalypsoFantasy  
Just some randum pictures or doodles I like to make :333

What’s it got to do with Yona?