ISO 9 is an

international standard An international standard is a technical standard developed by one or more international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use worldwide. The most prominent such organization is the International O ...

establishing a system for the

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 ...

into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters constituting the alphabets of many Slavic and non-Slavic languages. Published on February 23, 1995 by the

International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. M ...

, the major advantage ISO 9 has over other competing systems is its univocal system of one character for one character equivalents (by the use of diacritics), which faithfully represents the original spelling and allows for reverse transliteration, even if the language is unknown. Earlier versions of the standard, ISO/R 9:1954, ISO/R 9:1968 and ISO 9:1986, were more closely based on the international scholarly system for linguistics ( scientific transliteration), but have diverged in favour of unambiguous transliteration over phonemic representation. The edition of 1995 supersedes the edition of 1986.

ISO 9:1995

The standard features three mapping tables: the first covers contemporary Slavic languages, the second older Slavic orthographies (excluding letters from the first), and the third non-Slavic languages (including most letters from the first). Several Cyrillic characters included in ISO 9 are not available as pre-composed characters in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, nor are some of the transliterations;

combining diacritical marks Combining Diacritical Marks is a Unicode block containing the most common combining characters. It also contains the character " Combining Grapheme Joiner", which prevents canonical reordering of combining characters, and despite the name, actua ...

have to be used in these cases. Unicode, on the other hand, includes some historic characters that are not dealt with in ISO 9.

Transliteration table

The following combined table shows characters for various Slavic,

Iranian Iranian () may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Iran ** Iranian diaspora, Iranians living outside Iran ** Iranian architecture, architecture of Iran and parts of the rest of West Asia ** Iranian cuisine, cooking traditions and practic ...

, Romance, Turkic, Uralic, Mongolic, Caucasian, Tungusic, Paleosiberian and other languages of the former USSR which are written in Cyrillic.

National adoptions

Sample text

The following text is a fragment of the Preamble of the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal D ...

in Bulgarian:

ISO/R 9

ISO Recommendation No. 9, published 1954 and revised 1968, is an older version of the standard, with different transliteration for different

Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto- ...

, reflecting their

phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

differences. It is closer to the original international system of Slavist scientific transliteration. A German adaptation of this standard was published by the

Deutsches Institut für Normung ' (DIN; in English language, English, the German Institute for Standardisation) is a Germany, German non-profit organization and acting as national organization for standardization. DIN is the German International Organization for Standardizat ...

as DIN 1460 (1982) for Slavic languages and supplemented by DIN 1460-2 (2010) for non-Slavic languages. The languages covered are Russian (RU), Belarusian (BE), Ukrainian (UK), Bulgarian (BG), Serbo-Croatian (SH) and Macedonian (MK). For comparison, ISO 9:1995 is shown in the table below. Alternative schemes: ISO/R 9:1968 permits some deviations from the main standard. In the table below, they are listed in the columns ''alternative 1'' and ''alternative'' ''2''. #The first sub-standard defines some language-dependent transliterations for Russian (RU), Ukrainian (UK), Belarusian (BE) and Bulgarian (BG). #The second sub-standard permits, in countries where tradition favours it, a set of alternative transliterations, but only as a group. It is identical to the British Standard 2979:1958 for Cyrillic romanization.

Notes

The "informative" Annex A of ISO 9:1995 uses ISO 5426 0x52 ''hook to left'' which can be mapped to Unicode's ''comma below'' U+0326 (while the ISO 5426 also has 0x50 ''cedilla'' which can be mapped to Unicode's ''cedilla'' U+0327), it also uses ISO 5426 0x53 ''hook to right'' which can be mapped to Unicode's ''ogonek'' U+0328. See for exampl
Evertype.com's ISO 5426
mapping to Unicode o
Joan M. Aliprand's ''Finalized Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426 and ISO/IEC 10646-1''
. Evertype.com: ISO 5426 mapping to Unicode

Joan M. Aliprand: ''Finalized Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426 and ISO/IEC 10646-1''

The Unicode Standard: Spacing Modifier Letters
.

External links

Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts
– A collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pedersen. PDF reference charts include ISO 9.

CyrAcademisator
Bi-directional online transliteration of Russian for ALA-LC (diacritics), scientific, ISO/R 9, ISO 9, GOST 7.79B and others. Supports Old Slavonic characters
Lingua::Translit
Perl module covering a variety of writing systems. Transliteration according to several standards including ISO 9 and DIN 1460 for Cyrillic. * IDS (Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz, 2001) ''Katalogisierungsregeln IDS (KIDS)'', Anhänge,
IDS G.4: Transliteration der slavischen kyrillischen Alphabete
". Universität Zürich. URL accessed on 29-02-2012 (in German)—ISO/R 9 1968 standardization of scientific transliteration.
RUS1.NET
— 1:1 (univocal) transliteration map for learners of Russian, links to free auto-translit/IME tools for chrome/Firefox. {{DEFAULTSORT:Iso 9 * #00009 #00009