Cyrillization or Cyrillisation is the process of rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...

into (a version of) the

Cyrillic alphabet , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = Gr ...

. Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad hoc fashion, the term "cyrillization" usually refers to a consistent system applied, for example, to transcribe names of German, Chinese, or English people and places for use in

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * So ...

, Serbian, Macedonian or

Bulgarian Bulgarian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Bulgaria * Bulgarians, a South Slavic ethnic group * Bulgarian language, a Slavic language * Bulgarian alphabet * A citizen of Bulgaria, see Demographics of Bulgaria * Bul ...

newspapers and books. Cyrillization is analogous to

romanization Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, a ...

, when words from a non-

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern I ...

-using language are rendered in the Latin alphabet for use (e.g., in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

, or

Francophone literature Francophone literature is literature written in the French language. The existence of a plurality of literatures in the French language has been recognised, although the autonomy of these literatures is less defined than the plurality of literat ...

.) Just as with various Romanization schemes, each Cyrillization system has its own set of rules, depending on: * The source language or writing system (English, French, Arabic,

Hindi Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...

, Kazakh in

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...

, Chinese, Japanese, etc.), * The destination language or writing system (

, Kazakh in Cyrillic, etc.), * the goals of the systems: ** to render occasional foreign words (mostly personal and place names) for use in newspapers or on maps; ** to provide a practical approximate

phonetic transcription Phonetic transcription (also known as phonetic script or phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phones'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the I ...

in a

phrasebook A phrase book or phrasebook is a collection of ready-made phrases, usually for a foreign language along with a translation, indexed and often in the form of questions and answers. Structure While mostly thematically structured into several ...

or a

bilingual dictionary A bilingual dictionary or translation dictionary is a specialized dictionary used to translate words or phrases from one language to another. Bilingual dictionaries can be ''unidirectional'', meaning that they list the meanings of words of one lan ...

; ** or to convert a language to a Cyrillic writing system altogether (e.g.,

Dungan Dungan may refer to: * Donegan, an Irish surname, sometimes spelled Dungan * Dungan people, a group of Muslim people of Hui origin ** Dungan language ** Dungan, sometimes used to refer to Hui Chinese people generally * Dungan Mountains in Sibi Dist ...

, Kazakh) * Linguistic and/or political inclinations of the designers of the system (see, for example, the use—or disuse—of the letter Ґ for rendering the "G" of foreign words in

). When the source language uses a fairly phonetic spelling system (e.g., Spanish, Turkish), a Cyrillization scheme may often be adopted that almost amounts to a

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

, i.e., using a mapping scheme that simply maps each letter of the source alphabet to some letter of the destination alphabet, sometimes augmented by position-based rules. Among such schemes are several schemes universally accepted in

Eastern Slavic languages The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of the Slavic languages, distinct from the West and South Slavic languages. East Slavic languages are currently spoken natively throughout Eastern Europe, and eastwards to Sibe ...

: *

Cyrillization of Chinese The Cyrillization of Chinese (''Hanyu Cyril Pinyin'') is the transcription of Chinese characters into the Cyrillic alphabet. The Palladius System is the official Russian standard for transcribing Chinese into Russian, with variants existing for U ...

* Cyrillization of Manchu * Cyrillization of Kurdish * Cyrillization of Esperanto * Cyrillization of French * Cyrillization of German * Cyrillization of Italian * Cyrillization of Portuguese * Cyrillization of Spanish * Cyrillization of Greek *

Cyrillization of Japanese The cyrillization of Japanese is the process of transliterating or transcribing the Japanese language into Cyrillic script in order to represent Japanese proper names or terms in various languages that use Cyrillic, as an aid to Japanese languag ...

- e.g. Polivanov system * Cyrillization of Korean * Cyrillization of Arabic * Cyrillization of Hindi * Cyrillization of Polish Similarly, simple schemes are widely used to render words from Latin-script languages into Cyrillic-script languages. When the source language does not use a particularly phonetic writing system—most notably English and French—its words are typically rendered in Russian, Ukrainian, or other Cyrillic-based languages using an approximate phonetic

transcription Transcription refers to the process of converting sounds (voice, music etc.) into letters or musical notes, or producing a copy of something in another medium, including: Genetics * Transcription (biology), the copying of DNA into RNA, the fir ...

system, which aims to allow the Cyrillic readers to approximate the sound of the source language as much as it is possible within the constraints of the destination language and its orthography. Among the examples are the ''Practical transcription of English into Russian'' (russian: Правила англо-русской практической транскрипции), which aims to render English words into Russian based on their sounds, and ''Transliteration of foreign words by a Cyrillic alphabet'' ( :uk:Транслітерація іншомовних слів кирилицею) and ''Cyrillization of the English language'' ( :uk:Кирилізація англійської мови) in the case of Ukrainian. While this scheme is mostly accepted by a majority of Russian and Ukrainian authors and publishers, transcription variants are not uncommon. A

system for the

Cyrillization of English has been designed by the Bulgarian linguist Andrey Danchev. Similarly, phonetic schemes are widely adopted for Cyrillization of French, especially considering the fairly large number of French loanwords that have been borrowed into Russian.

See also