The romanization of Ukrainian is the representation of the Ukrainian language in the Latin alphabet. Ukrainian is written in its own alphabet, which is based on the Cyrillic script. Romanization 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. Methods of romanization include transliteration (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, but none have been widely accepted.
Romanization systems
Transliteration Transliteration is the letter-for-letter representation of text using another writing system. 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.Rudnyckyj 1948, p. 1. 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.Transliteration Timeline on the website of the University of Arizona Library 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, 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.
|- style="text-align:left; " !Typical use !Variation !Example |- | Original Cyrillic text | – | Ярослав Рудницький |- | Library catalogue,standalone bibliography | Strict ALA-LC | I͡Aroslav Rudnyt͡sʹkyĭ |- | Footnote or bibliography | Without ligatures | Iaroslav Rudnytsʹkyĭ |- | Academic text | Without ligatures or diacritics | Iaroslav Rudnytskyi |- | Names in general text | Modified Library of Congress | Yaroslav Rudnytsky |- | Ukrainian National transliteration | Modified BGN/PCGN | Yaroslav Rudnytskyi
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 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 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'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 and Ukraine, 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 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 graphemes 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, and requires only ASCII 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) 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, 2010Romanization system in Ukraine, paper presented on East Central and South-East Europe Division of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names 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) expertsThe document prepared for the UNGEGN session by Ukrainian 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, Pivnichnokrymskyi kanal not North Crimean Canal.
Romanization for other languages than English