The romanization of Ukrainian, or Latinization of Ukrainian, is the representation of the

Ukrainian language Ukrainian (, ) is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language, spoken primarily in Ukraine. It is the first language, first (native) language of a large majority of Ukrainians. Written Ukrainian uses the Ukrainian alphabet, a variant of t ...

in Latin letters. Ukrainian is written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, which is based on the

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 ...

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 ...

may be employed to represent Ukrainian text or pronunciation for non-Ukrainian readers, on computer systems that cannot reproduce Cyrillic characters, or for typists who are not familiar with the Ukrainian

keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keybo ...

. Methods of romanization include

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 ...

(representing written text) and transcription (representing the spoken word). In contrast to romanization, there have been several historical proposals for a Ukrainian Latin alphabet, usually based on those used by

West Slavic languages The West Slavic languages are a subdivision of the Slavic language group. They include Polish, Czech, Slovak, Kashubian, Silesian, Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian. The languages have traditionally been spoken across a mostly continuous re ...

, but none have been widely accepted.

Romanization systems

Transliteration

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 ...

is the letter-for-letter representation of text using another

writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

. Rudnyckyj classified transliteration systems into scientific transliteration, used in academic and especially linguistic works, and practical systems, used in administration, journalism, in the postal system, in schools, etc. Scientific transliteration, also called the scholarly system, is used internationally, with very little variation, while the various practical methods of transliteration are adapted to the orthographical conventions of other languages, like English, French, German, etc. Depending on the purpose of the transliteration it may be necessary to be able to reconstruct the original text, or it may be preferable to have a transliteration which sounds like the original language when read aloud.

Scientific transliteration

'' Scientific transliteration'', also called the ''academic'', ''linguistic'', ''international'', or ''scholarly'' system, is most often seen in linguistic publications on Slavic languages. It is purely phonemic, meaning each character represents one meaningful unit of sound, and is based on the Croatian Latin alphabet. Different variations are appropriate to represent the phonology of historical Old Ukrainian (mid 11th–14th centuries) and Middle Ukrainian (15th–18th centuries). A variation was codified in the 1898 Prussian Instructions for libraries, or ''Preußische Instruktionen'' (PI), and widely used in bibliographic cataloguing in Central Europe and Scandinavia. With further modifications it was published by the International Organization for Standardization as recommendation ISO/R 9 in 1954, revised in 1968, and again as an international standard in 1986 and 1995. Representing all of the necessary diacritics on computers requires

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 ...

, Latin-2, Latin-4, or Latin-7 encoding. Other Slavic based romanizations occasionally seen are those based on the Slovak alphabet or the Polish alphabet, which include symbols for palatalized consonants.

Library of Congress system

The ''ALA-LC Romanization Tables'' were first discussed by the American Library Association in 1885, and published in 1904 and 1908, including rules for romanizing Church Slavic, the pre-reform Russian alphabet, and Serbo-Croatian. Revised tables including Ukrainian were published in 1941, and remain in use virtually unchanged according to the latest 2011 release. This system is used to represent bibliographic information by US and Canadian libraries, by the British Library since 1975,Searching for Cyrillic items in the catalogues of the British Library: guidelines and transliteration tables
https://www.bl.uk/help/search-for-cyrillic-items and in North American publications. In addition to bibliographic cataloguing, simplified versions of the Library of Congress system are widely used for romanization in the text of academic and general publications. For notes or bibliographical references, some publications use a version without ligatures, which offers sufficient precision but simplifies the typesetting burden and easing readability. For specialist audiences or those familiar with Slavic languages, a version without ligatures and diacritical marks is sometimes used. For broader audiences, a "modified Library of Congress system" is employed for personal, organizational, and place names, omitting all ligatures and diacritics, ignoring the soft sign ь (ʹ), with initial Є- (''I͡E-''), Й- (''Ĭ-''), Ю- ( ''I͡U-''), and Я- (''I͡A-'') represented by ''Ye-'', ''Y-'', ''Yu-'', and ''Ya-'', surnames' terminal -ий (''-yĭ'') and -ій (''-iĭ'') endings simplified to ''-y'', and sometimes with common first names anglicized, for example, Олександр (''Oleksandr'') written as ''Alexander''. : Similar principles were systematically described for Russian by J. Thomas Shaw in 1969, and since widely adopted. Their application for Ukrainian and multilingual text were described in the 1984 English translation of Kubiiovych's ''

Encyclopedia of Ukraine The ''Encyclopedia of Ukraine'' (), published from 1984 to 2001, is a fundamental work of Ukrainian Studies. Development The work was created under the auspices of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Europe (Sarcelles, near Paris). As the ...

'' and in the 1997 translation of Hrushevskyi's '' History of Ukraine-Rus'', and other sources have referred to these, for example, historian Serhii Plokhy in several works. However, the details of usage vary, for example, the authors of the ''Historical Dictionary of Ukraine'' render the soft sign ь before о with an ''i'', "thus Khvyliovy, not Khvylovy, as in the ''Encyclopedia of Ukraine''". Requires Unicode for connecting diacritics, but only plain ASCII characters for a simplified version.

British Standard

''British Standard 2979:1958 "Transliteration of Cyrillic and Greek Characters"'', from BSI, is used by the Oxford University Press.''Oxford Style Manual'' (2003), "Slavonic Languages", s 11.41.2, p 350. Oxford University Press. A variation is used by the British Museum and British Library, but since 1975 their new acquisitions have been catalogued using Library of Congress transliteration. In addition to the "British" system, the standard also includes tables for the "International" system for Cyrillic, corresponding to ISO/R 9:1968 (and ISO's recommendation reciprocally has an alternate system corresponding to BSI's). It also includes tables for romanization of Greek.

BGN/PCGN

'' BGN/PCGN romanization'' is a series of standards approved by the

United States Board on Geographic Names The United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN) is a Federal government of the United States, federal body operating under the United States Secretary of the Interior. The purpose of the board is to establish and maintain uniform usage of geogr ...

and Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use. Pronunciation is intuitive for English-speakers. For Ukrainian, the former BGN/PCGN system was adopted in 1965, but superseded there by the Ukrainian National System in 2019. A modified version is also mentioned in the Oxford Style Manual. Requires only ASCII characters if optional separators are not used.

GOST (1971, 1983)/Derzhstandart (1995, 2021)

The Soviet Union's GOST,

COMECON The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, often abbreviated as Comecon ( ) or CMEA, was an economic organization from 1949 to 1991 under the leadership of the Soviet Union that comprised the countries of the Eastern Bloc#List of states, Easter ...

's SEV, and Ukraine's Derzhstandart are government standards bodies of the former Eurasian communist countries. They published a series of romanization systems for Ukrainian, which were replaced by ISO 9:1995. For details, see GOST 16876-71.

DSTU 9112:2021

On 1 April 2022, the "Cyrillic-Latin transliteration and Latin-Cyrillic retransliteration of Ukrainian texts. Writing rules" (ДСТУ 9112:2021) was approved as State Standard of Ukraine. The standard is based on modified ISO 9:1995 standard and was developed by the Technical Committee 144 "Information and Documentation" of the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine. According to the SSTL, it could be used in future cooperation between the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

and

Ukraine Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...

, in which "Ukrainian will soon, along with other European languages, take its rightful place in multilingual natural language processing scenarios, including machine translation." The Derzhstandart 1995 system (invented by Maksym Vakulenko) is also mentioned in the DSTU 9112:2021 standard (approved in 2022) as the "B system"; the new standard also includes an "A system" with diacritical marks and some differences from ISO 9:1995: г=ğ, ґ=g, є=je, и=y, і=i, х=x, ь=j, ю=ju, я=ja.

ISO 9

ISO 9 is a series of systems from 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 ISO published editions of its "international system" for romanization of Cyrillic as recommendations (ISO/R 9) in 1954 and 1968, and standards (ISO 9) in 1986 and 1995. This was originally derived from scientific transliteration in 1954 and is meant to be usable by readers of most European languages. The 1968 edition also included an alternative system identical to the British Standard. The 1995 edition supports most national Cyrillic alphabets in a single transliteration table. It is a pure transliteration system, with each Cyrillic character represented by exactly one unique Latin character, making it reliably reversible, but sacrificing readability and adaptation to individual languages. It considers only

grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...

s and disregards phonemic differences. So, for example, г ( Ukrainian He or Russian Ge) is always represented by the transliteration ''g''; ґ ( Ukrainian letter Ge) is represented by ''g̀''. Representing all of the necessary diacritics on computers requires Unicode, and a few characters are rarely present in computer fonts, for example g-grave: g̀.

Ukrainian National transliteration

This is the official system of Ukraine, also employed by the United Nations and many countries' foreign services. It is currently widely used to represent Ukrainian geographic names, which were almost exclusively romanized from Russian before Ukraine's independence in 1991, and for personal names in passports. It is based on

English orthography English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. English's orthograp ...

, and requires only

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

characters with no diacritics. It can be considered a variant of the "modified Library of Congress system", but does not simplify the -ий and -ій endings. Its first version was codified in Decision No. 9 of the Ukrainian Committee on Issues of Legal Terminology on April 19, 1996,Рішення Української Комісії з питань правничої термінології (in Ukrainian)
/ref> stating that the system is binding for the transliteration of Ukrainian names in English in legislative and official acts. A new official system was introduced for transliteration of Ukrainian personal names in Ukrainian passports in 2007. An updated 2010 version became the system used for transliterating all proper names and was approved as Resolution 55 of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, January 27, 2010.Resolution no. 55
of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, January 27, 2010 This modified earlier laws and brought together a unified system for official documents, publication of cartographic works, signs and indicators of inhabited localities, streets, stops, subway stations, etc. It has been adopted internationally. The 27th session of the UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names ( UNGEGN) held in New York 30 July and 10 August 2012 after a report by the State Agency of Land Resources of Ukraine (now known as Derzhheokadastr: Ukraine State Service of Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre) experts approved the Ukrainian system of romanization. The BGN/PCGN jointly adopted the system in 2019. Official geographic names are romanized directly from the original Ukrainian and not translated. For example, ''Kyivska oblast'' not ''

Kyiv Oblast Kyiv Oblast (, ), also called Kyivshchyna (, ), is an Administrative divisions of Ukraine, oblast (province) in central and northern Ukraine. It surrounds, but does not include, the city of Kyiv, which is administered as a city with special sta ...

'', ''Pivnichnokrymskyi kanal'' not '' North Crimean Canal''.

Romanization for other languages than English

Romanization intended for readers of other languages than English is usually transcribed phonetically into the familiar orthography. For example, ''y'', ''kh'', ''ch'', ''sh'', ''shch'' for anglophones may be transcribed ''j'', ''ch'', ''tsch'', ''sch'', ''schtsch'' for German readers (for letters й, х, ч, ш, щ), or it may be rendered in Latin letters according to the normal orthography of another Slavic language, such as Polish or Croatian (such as the established system of scientific transliteration, described above). Czech and Slovak standard transliteration uses letters with diacritics (ž, š, č, ď, ť, ň, ě) and letters i, y, j, h, ch, c in the local meaning. Diphthong letters are transcribed as two letters (ja, je, ji, ju, šč). Czech transliteration was used, for example, on hiking signs in Transcarpathia, which was established according to the methodology of the Czech Tourists Club – the Ukrainian markers replaced that later with the English transcription. However, the fact that Ukraine itself has started to use English transliteration on its documents and boards, also influences the practice in Czech and Slovak, which is also penetrated by English transliteration of Ukrainian.

Ad hoc romanization

Users of public-access computers or mobile text messaging services sometimes improvise informal romanization due to limitations in keyboard or character set. These may include both sound-alike and look-alike letter substitutions. Example: ''YKPAIHCbKA ABTOPKA'' for "УКРАЇНСЬКА АВТОРКА". See also Volapuk encoding. This system uses the available character set.

Ukrainian telegraph code

For telegraph transmission. Each separate Ukrainian letter had a 1:1 equivalence to a Latin letter. Latin Q, W, V, and X are equivalent to Ukrainian Я (or sometimes Щ), В, Ж, Ь. Other letters are transcribed phonetically. This equivalency is used in building the KOI8-U table.

Transcription

Transcription is the representation of the spoken word. Phonological, or phonemic, transcription represents the

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s, or meaningful sounds of a language, and is useful to describe the general pronunciation of a word.

Phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

transcription represents every single sound, or phone, and can be used to compare different dialects of a language. Both methods can use the same sets of symbols, but linguists usually denote phonemic transcriptions by enclosing them in slashes / ... /, while phonetic transcriptions are enclosed in square brackets ... ; IPA The

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

precisely represents pronunciation. It requires a special Unicode font.

Conventional romanization of proper names

In many contexts, it is common to use a modified system of transliteration that strives to be read and pronounced naturally by anglophones. Such transcriptions are also used for the surnames of people of Ukrainian ancestry in English-speaking countries (personal names have often been translated to equivalent or similar English names, e.g., "Alexander" for ''Oleksandr'', "Terry" for ''Taras''). Typically, such a modified transliteration is based on the

ALA-LC ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...

, or Library of Congress (in North America), or, less commonly, the British Standard system. Such a simplified system usually omits

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s and ligatures (tie-bars) from, e.g., ''i͡e'', ''ï'' or ''ĭ'', often simplifies ''-yĭ'' and ''-iĭ'' word endings to "-y", omits romanizing the Ukrainian soft sign (''ь'') and apostrophe ('' '''), and may substitute ''ya, ye, yu, yo'' for ''ia, ie, iu, io'' at the beginnings of words. It may also simplify doubled letters. Unlike in the

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

where an apostrophe is punctuation, in the

it is a letter. Therefore sometimes Rus' is translated with an apostrophe, even when the apostrophe is dropped for most other names and words. Conventional transliterations can reflect the history of a person or place. Many well-known spellings are based on transcriptions into another Latin alphabet, such as the German or Polish. Others are transcribed from equivalent names in other languages, for example Ukrainian ''Pavlo'' ("Paul") may be called by the Russian equivalent ''Pavel'', Ukrainian ''

Kyiv Kyiv, also Kiev, is the capital and most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city of Ukraine. Located in the north-central part of the country, it straddles both sides of the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2022, its population was 2, ...

'' by the Russian equivalent ''Kiev''. The employment of romanization systems can become complex. For example, the English translation of Kubijovyč's ''Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopædia'' uses a modified Library of Congress (ALA-LC) system as outlined above for Ukrainian and Russian names—with the exceptions for endings or doubled consonants applying variously to personal and geographic names. For technical reasons, maps in the Encyclopedia follow different conventions. Names of persons are anglicized in the encyclopedia's text but also presented in their original form in the index. Various geographic names are presented in their anglicized, Russian, or both Ukrainian and Polish forms, and appear in several forms in the index. Scientific transliteration is used in linguistics articles. The Encyclopedia's explanation of its transliteration and naming convention occupies 2-1/2 pages.

Tables of romanization systems

: : :

Notes

References

*Clara Beetle ed. (1949),
A.L.A. Cataloging Rules for Author and Title Entries
', Chicago: American Library Association, p 246. *''British Standard 2979 : 1958'', London: British Standards Institution. * Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. (1996). ''The World's Writing Systems'', pp. 700, 702, Oxford University Press. . *G. Gerych (1965),
Transliteration of Cyrillic Alphabets
', masters thesis, Ottawa: University of Ottawa. *Maryniak, K. (2008),
Короткий огляд систем транслітерації з української на англійську мову
(Brief Overview of Transliteration Systems from Ukrainian to English), ''Західньоканадський збірник — Collected Papers on Ukrainian Life in Western Canada'', Part Five, Edmonton–Ostroh: Shevchenko Scientific Society in Canada, pp. 478–84. * Rudnyc'kyj, Jaroslav B. (1948). ''Чужомовні транслітерації українських назв: Iнтернаціональна, англійська, французька, німецька, еспанська й португальська'' (Foreign transliterations of Ukrainian names: The international, English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese), Augsburg: Iнститут родо- й знаменознавства. * U.S. Board on Geographic Names, Foreign Names Committee Staff (1994). ''Romanization Systems and Roman-Script Spelling Conventions'', p. 105.

External links

English transliteration
by the Central Certification Authority of the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, whether by letters (e.g. in passport number) and by words

by the State Migration Service of Ukraine
Standard Ukrainian Transliteration
— multistandard bidirectional online transliteration (BGN/PCGN, scholarly, national, ISO 9, ALA-LC, etc.) (in Ukrainian)
Ukrainian Transliteration
��online Ukrainian transliteration
Ukrainian Translit
��online Ukrainian transliteration service (non-standard system)

��online transliterator (non-standard system)

—history of the transliteration of Slavic languages into Latin alphabets
Lingua::Translit

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

module covering a variety of writing systems. Transliteration according to several standards (e.g. ISO 9 and DIN 1460).

Transliteration systems

Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts
A collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pedersen. PDF reference charts for many languages' transliteration systems
Ukrainian PDFLatin transliteration
��transliteration systems used for national Ukrainian domain names (in Ukrainian)
Decision No. 858
affecting transliteration of names passports (2007) (Ukrainian)
Working Group on Romanization Systems
under the United Nations Conferences on the Standardization of Geographical Names.
Ukrainian (PDF)
Scanned text of the 1997 edition of the ''ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts''
Ukrainian PDFBGN/PCGN 1965 Romanization System for Ukrainian
at geonames.nga.mil

based on both International Linguistic and ALA-LC systems
Ukrainian language in the International Phonetic Alphabet
(PDF, in Ukrainian) {{Ukrainian language Ukrainian Ukrainian Ukrainian orthography