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 ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

into (a version of) the

Cyrillic alphabet The Cyrillic 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 countries in Southeastern Europe, Easte ...

. 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) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

, Ukrainian,

Serbian Serbian may refer to: * Pertaining to Serbia in Southeast Europe; in particular **Serbs, a South Slavic ethnic group native to the Balkans ** Serbian language ** Serbian culture **Demographics of Serbia, includes other ethnic groups within the co ...

Macedonian Macedonian most often refers to someone or something from or related to Macedonia. Macedonian(s) may refer to: People Modern * Macedonians (ethnic group), a nation and a South Slavic ethnic group primarily associated with North Macedonia * Mac ...

or Bulgarian newspapers and books. Cyrillization is analogous to

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

, when words from a non-

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a 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 Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

-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: Culture, language and peoples * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England * ''English'', an Amish ter ...

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also 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 liter ...

.) 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 Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

, Kazakh in

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

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

, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, 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 ''phonetics'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the ...

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 Translation, translate Word (linguistics), words or phrases from one language to another. Bilingual dictionaries can be ''unidirectional'', meaning that they list ...

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

Dungan Dungan may refer to: * 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 District, Pakistan * Donegan, an Irish surname, sometimes ...

, 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 Ukrainian). 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 → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , 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. There a number of schemes: *

Cyrillization of Arabic Cyrillization of Arabic is the conversion of text written in Arabic script into Cyrillic script. Because the Arabic script is an abjad (a writing system without vowels), an accurate ''transliteration'' into Cyrillic, an alphabet, would still requ ...

Cyrillization of Chinese The cyrillization of Chinese 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 Ukrainian, Belarusian ...

Cyrillization of Esperanto Esperanto is written in a Latin-script alphabet of twenty-eight letters, with upper and lower case. This is supplemented by punctuation marks and by various logograms, such as the digits 0–9, currency signs such as $ € ¥ £ ₷, and mathema ...

Cyrillization of French Cyrillization or Cyrillisation is the process of rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than Cyrillic script into (a version of) the Cyrillic alphabet. Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad ...

Cyrillization of German Cyrillization or Cyrillisation is the process of rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than Cyrillic script into (a version of) the Cyrillic alphabet. Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad ...

Cyrillization of Greek Cyrillization of Greek refers to the transcription or transliteration of text from the Greek alphabet to the Cyrillic script. The Early Cyrillic alphabet included the entire Greek alphabet: . However, modern Cyrillic alphabets omit some Greek let ...

Cyrillization of Hebrew Cyrillization or Cyrillisation is the process of rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than Cyrillic script into (a version of) the Cyrillic alphabet. Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad ...

Cyrillization of Hindi Cyrillization or Cyrillisation is the process of rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than Cyrillic script into (a version of) the Cyrillic alphabet. Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad ...

Cyrillization of Italian Cyrillization or Cyrillisation is the process of rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than Cyrillic script into (a version of) the Cyrillic alphabet. Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad ...

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 langu ...

- e.g. Polivanov system * Cyrillization of Korean * Cyrillization of Manchu *

Cyrillization of Polish ''Cyrillization of Polish'' may refer to: * Cyrillization of Polish under the Russian Empire * Cyrillic transcriptions of Polish {{disambiguation ...

Cyrillization of Portuguese Cyrillization or Cyrillisation is the process of rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than Cyrillic script into (a version of) the Cyrillic alphabet. Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad ...

* Cyrillization of Spanish 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, often th ...

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'' (), 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 Bulgarian 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.

References

* A. Danchev, Bulgarian transcription of English names, Narodna Prosveta, Sofia, 1982 (in Bulgarian) * R.S. Gilyrevsky (Гиляревский Р. С.), editor: "Practical Transcription of Personal and Family Names" (''Практическая транскрипция фамильно-именных групп.'') Moscow, Fizmatliz, 2004. . — (covers 6 European languages, as well as Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, and Japanese) ** same, 2nd edition; Moscow, Nauka, 2006, 526. . (11 European languages, as well as Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, Hindi, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese) * R.S. Gilyrevsky (Гиляревский Р. С.), B.A. Starostin (Старостин Б. А.) "Foreign Names in the Russian Text: A Handbook" (''Иностранные имена и названия в русском тексте: Справочник''). 3rd edition. Moscow, Vysshaya Shkola, 1985. * D.I. Ermolovich (Ермолович Д. И.) "Personal Names at the Junction of Languages and Cultures" (''Имена собственные на стыке языков и культур''). Moscow, R. Valent, 2001. . (23 languages) * D.I. Ermolovich (Ермолович Д. И.) "Personal Names: Theory and Practice of Interlanguage Transmission at the Junction of Languages and Cultures" (''Имена собственные: теория и практика межъязыковой передачи на стыке языков и культур''. Moscow, R. Valent, 2005. . * R.A. Lidin (Лидин Р. А). "Foreign family names and personal names. Spelling and pronunciation. Practical transcription into Russian: Dictionary Handbook" (''Иностранные фамилии и личные имена. Написание и произношение. Практическая транскрипция на русский язык: Словарь-справочник'') Moscow, Vneshsigma, 1998. . {{Cultural assimilation Transliteration

See also

References