Romanization of Ukrainian - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

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

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....

using Latin letters

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet

Ukrainian alphabet

The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, the official language of Ukraine. It is one of the national variations of the Cyrillic script....

, a variation of Cyrillic

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

.

Romanization may be employed to represent Ukrainian text or pronunciation

Pronunciation

Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect....

for non-Ukrainian readers, on computer systems that cannot reproduce Cyrillic characters, or for typists who are not familiar with the Ukrainian keyboard layout

Keyboard layout

A keyboard layout is any specific mechanical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key–meaning associations of a computer, typewriter, or other typographic keyboard....

. Methods of romanization

Romanization

In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...

include transliteration

Transliteration

Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...

, representing written text, and transcription

Transcription (linguistics)

Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...

, representing the spoken word.

In contrast to romanization, there have been several historical proposals for a native Ukrainian Latin alphabet

Ukrainian Latin alphabet

A Latin alphabet for the Ukrainian language has been proposed or imposed several times in the history in Ukraine, but has never challenged the conventional Cyrillic Ukrainian alphabet. Actually it is promoted as a way of facilitating the Ukrainian integration within the European Union.In or...

, usually based on those used by West Slavic languages

West Slavic languages

The West Slavic languages are a subdivision of the Slavic language group that includes Czech, Polish, Slovak, Kashubian and Sorbian.Classification:* Indo-European** Balto-Slavic*** Slavic**** West Slavic***** Czech-Slovak languages****** Czech...

, but none has caught on.

Romanization systems

Transliteration

Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...

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

Writing system

A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...

. Rudnyckyj classified transliteration systems into the scholarly system, used in academic and especially linguistic works, and practical systems, used in administration, journalism, in the postal system, in schools, etc. The scholarly or scientific 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.

International scholarly system

Also called scientific transliteration
Scientific transliteration
Scientific transliteration, variously called academic, linguistic, or scholarly transliteration, is an international system for transliteration of text from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet...

, this 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

Serbo-Croatian language

Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...

Latin alphabet.http://intranet.library.arizona.edu/users/brewerm/sil/lib/transhist.html It was codified in the 1898 Prussian Instructions for libraries, or Preußische Instruktionen (PI). It was later adopted by the International Organization for Standardization, with minor differences, as ISO/R 9:1968.

Representing all of the necessary diacritics on computers requires Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

, Latin-2, Latin-4, or Latin-7 encoding. Other Slavic based romanizations occasionally seen are those based on the Slovak alphabet

Slovak alphabet

The Slovak alphabet uses a modification of the Latin alphabet. The modifications include the four diacriticals placed above certain letters. Therefore the Slovak alphabet has 46 graphemes.- Vowels :- Consonants :Notes...

or the Polish alphabet

Polish alphabet

The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography . It is based on the Latin alphabet, but includes certain letters with diacritics: the line or kreska, which is graphically similar to an acute accent ; the overdot or kropka ; the tail or...

, which include symbols for palatalized consonants.

Library of Congress system

The ALA-LC Romanization Tables, published by the American Library Association (1885) and Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

(1905). Used to represent bibliographic information by US and Canadian libraries, by the British Library since 1975, and in North American publications. The latest 1997 revision is very similar to the 1905 version.

Requires Unicode for connecting diacritics—these are used in bibliographies and catalogues, but typically omitted in running text.

British Standard

British Standard 2979:1958, from BSI

BSI Group

BSI Group, also known in its home market as the British Standards Institution , is a multinational business services provider whose principal activity is the production of standards and the supply of standards-related services.- History :...

, is used by the 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.

BGN/PCGN

BGN/PCGN romanization
BGN/PCGN romanization
BGN/PCGN romanization refers to the systems for romanization and Roman-script spelling conventions adopted by the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use .The systems have been approved by the BGN and the PCGN for...

is a series of standards approved by the United States Board on Geographic Names

United States Board on Geographic Names

The United States Board on Geographic Names is a United States federal body whose purpose is to establish and maintain uniform usage of geographic names throughout the U.S. government.-Overview:...

and Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use, and also adopted by the United Nations. Pronunciation is intuitive for English-speakers. Latest revision is from 1965. 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)

The Soviet Union's GOST

GOST

GOST refers to a set of technical standards maintained by the Euro-Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification , a regional standards organization operating under the auspices of the Commonwealth of Independent States .All sorts of regulated standards are included, with examples...

, COMECON

Comecon

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance , 1949–1991, was an economic organisation under hegemony of Soviet Union comprising the countries of the Eastern Bloc along with a number of communist states elsewhere in the world...

's SEV, and Ukraine's Derzhstandart

Derzhspozhivstandard

The State Committee for Technical Regulation and Consumer Policy is the Ukrainian state standards organization, established in 2002...

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

GOST 16876-71

GOST 16876-71 is a romanization system devised by the National Administration for Geodesy and Cartography of the Soviet Union. It is based on the scientific transliteration system used in linguistics. GOST was an international standard so it included provision for a number of the languages of...

ISO 9:1995

ISO 9

The international standard ISO 9 establishes a system for the transliteration into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters constituting the alphabets of many Slavic and some non-Slavic languages....

is a standard from the International Organization for Standardization

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

. It supports most national Cyrillic alphabets in a single transliteration table. Each Cyrillic character is represented by exactly one unique Latin character, so the transliteration is reliably reversible. This was originally derived from the Scholarly system in 1954, and is meant to be usable by readers of most European languages.

The 1995 revision 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

Ge with upturn

Ge with upturn is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. In Ukrainian, Urum and Rusyn, this letter is called "Ge", and the letter ⟨Г⟩ is called "He"...

) 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 (1996)

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 Ukrainian independence in 1991. Based on English orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

. It was codified in Decision No. 9 of the Committee on Issues of Legal Terminology, on April 19, 1996.

The decision states that the system is binding for the transliteration of Ukrainian names in English in legislative and official acts. A new official system has been introduced for transliteration of Ukrainian personal names in Ukrainian passport in 2007 (see below).

The system requires only ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

characters.

Ukrainian National transliteration (2010)

The system is used for transliterating all praper names (i.e. personal names in Ukrainian passport

Ukrainian passport

The Ukrainian passport is a document issued to the nationals of Ukraine as the main proof of Ukrainian citizenship.There are two types of passport issued by the Ukrainian government that are commonly known as internal passport and international passport. An internal passport is used as a primary...

s, geographical names on maps and road signs, etc.) approved as Decision no. 55 of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine

Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine

The Cabinet of Ukraine is the highest body of state executive power in Ukraine also referred to as the Government of Ukraine...

, January 27, 2010.

The system requires only ASCII

ASCII

characters.

Romanization for other languages

Romanization intended for readers of other languages 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 (as does the established scholarly system, above).

Ad hoc romanization

Users of public-access computers or mobile text messaging services

Short message service

Short Message Service is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices...

sometimes improvise informal romanization due to limitations in keyboard or character set. These may include both sound-alike and look-alike letter substitutions. Example: YKRAINCbKA ABTORKA for "УКРАЇНСЬКА АВТОРКА". See also Volapuk encoding

Volapuk encoding

Volapuk encoding or latinitsa is a slang term for rendering the letters of the Cyrillic script with Latin ones...

This system uses the available character set.

Ukrainian telegraph code

For telegraph transmission. Each separate Ukrainian letter had latin equivalent 1:1. So latin Q, W, V, X are equivalent to ukrainian Я (or Щ sometimes), В, Ж, Ь. Other letters are transcribed phonetically. That principle is used in building KOI8-U

KOI8-U

KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,...

table.

Transcription

Transcription (linguistics)

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

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

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

International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...

precisely represents pronunciation. 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

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

. 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).

Usually such a usage is based on either the Library of Congress (in North America) or British Standard system. Such a simplified system usually omits diacritic

Diacritic

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

s and tie-bars, simplifies -yj and -ij word endings to "-y", ignores the Ukrainian soft sign

Soft sign

The soft sign , also known as yer, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short front vowel. As with its companion, the back yer, the vowel phoneme it designated was later partly dropped and partly merged with other vowels...

(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.

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 by the Russian equivalent Kiev.

Sometimes Rus’

Rus (name)

Originally, the name Rus referred to the people, the region, and the medieval states of the Rus' Khaganate and Kievan Rus' polities...

is translated with an apostrophe, even when the apostrophe is dropped for all other names and words.

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. Scholarly 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

style="font-weight:bold;" | Common systems for romanizing Ukrainian
Cyrillic	Scholarly*	ALA-LC†	British‡	BGN/PCGN**	ISO 9	National††	French‡‡	German***
А а	a	a	a	a	a	a	a	a
Б б	b	b	b	b	b	b	b	b
В в	v	v	v	v	v	v	v	w
Г г	h	h	g	h	g	h, gh¹	h	h
Ґ ґ	g	g	g	g	g̀	g	g	g
Д д	d	d	d	d	d	d	d	d
Е е	e	e	e	e	e	e	e	e
Є є	je		ye	ye	ê	ie, ye²	ie	je
Ж ж	ž		zh	zh	ž	zh	j	sh
З з	z	z	z	z	z	z	z	s
И и	y	y	y	y	i	y	y	y
І і	i	i	i	i	ì	i	i	i
Ї ї	ji (ï)	ï	ï	yi	ï	i, yi²	ï	ji
Й й	j	ĭ	ĭ	y	j	i, y²	y	j
К к	k	k	k	k	k	k	k	k
Л л	l	l	l	l	l	l	l	l
М м	m	m	m	m	m	m	m	m
Н н	n	n	n	n	n	n	n	n
О о	o	o	o	o	o	o	o	o
П п	p	p	p	p	p	p	p	p
Р р	r	r	r	r	r	r	r	r
С с	s	s	s	s	s	s	s	s, ss
Т т	t	t	t	t	t	t	t	t
У у	u	u	u	u	u	u	ou	u
Ф ф	f	f	f	f	f	f	f	f
Х х	x (ch)	kh	kh	kh	h	kh	kh	ch
Ц ц	c		ts	ts	c	ts	ts	z
Ч ч	č	ch	ch	ch	č	ch	tch	tsch
Ш ш	š	sh	sh	sh	š	sh	ch	sch
Щ щ	šč	shch	shch	shch	ŝ	sch	chtch	schtsch
Ь ь	′	′	′	’	′	’	–	–
Ю ю	ju		yu	yu	û	iu, yu²	iou	ju
Я я	ja		ya	ya	â	ia, ya²	ia	ja
’	- (″)	-	″	”	’	”	–	–

**Official Ukrainian transliteration systems**
Cyrillic	GOST 1971	GOST 1986	Derzhstandart 1995	National 1996	Passport 2004	Passport 2007	Passport 2010
А а	a	a	a	a	a	a	a
Б б	b	b	b	b	b	b	b
В в	v	v	v	v	v, w	v	v
Г г	g	g	gh	h, gh*^	h, g	g	h, gh*^
Ґ ґ	–	–	g	g	g, h	g	g
Д д	d	d	d	d	d	d	d
Е е	e	e	e	e	e	e	e
Є є	je	je	je	ie, ye*	ie, ye*	ie	ie, ye*
Ж ж	zh	ž	zh	zh	zh, j	zh	zh
З з	z	z	z	z	z	z	z
И и	i	i	y	y	y	y	y
І i	i	i	i	i	i	i	i
Ї ї	ji	i	ji	i, yi*	i, yi*	i	i, yi*
Й й	j	j	j**	i, y*	i, y*	i	i, y*
К к	k	k	k	k	k, c	k	k
Л л	l	l	l	l	l	l	l
М м	m	m	m	m	m	m	m
Н н	n	n	n	n	n	n	n
О о	o	o	o	o	o	o	o
П п	p	p	p	p	p	p	p
Р р	r	r	r	r	r	r	r
С с	s	s	s	s	s	s	s
Т т	t	t	t	t	t	t	t
У у	u	u	u	u	u	u	u
Ф ф	f	f	f	f	f	f	f
Х х	kh	h	kh	kh	kh	kh	kh
Ц ц	c	c	c	ts	ts	ts	ts
Ч ч	ch	č	ch	ch	ch	ch	ch
Ш ш	sh	š	sh	sh	sh	sh	sh
Щ щ	shh	šč	shh	sch	shch	shch	shch
Ь ь	'	'	j***	’	'	–	–
Ю ю	ju	ju	ju	iu, yu*	iu, yu*	iu	iu, yu*
Я я	ja	ja	ja	ia, ya*	ia, ya*	ia	ia, ya*
’	*	"	'****	”	–	–	–

* The second transliteration is used word-initially.
** Word-initially, after vowels or after the apostrophe.
*** After consonants.
**** Apostrophe is used before iotated ja, ju, je, ji, jo, and to distinguish the combination ьа (j'a) in compound words from я (ja), for example, Волиньавто = Volynj'avto.
*^ gh is used in the romanization of зг (zgh), avoiding confusion with ж (zh).

External links

Standard Ukrainian Transliteration — multistandard bidirectional online transliteration (BGN/PCGN, scholarly, national, ISO 9, ALA-LC, etc.) (in Ukrainian)
Ukrainian Translit — online Ukrainian transliteration service (non-standard system)
Ukrainian-Latin and Latin-Ukrainian — online transliterator (non-standard system)
Transliteration history — history of the transliteration of Slavic languages into Latin alphabets
Lingua::Translit Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

module and online service covering a variety of writing systems. Transliteration according to several standards (e.g. ISO 9
ISO 9
The international standard ISO 9 establishes a system for the transliteration into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters constituting the alphabets of many Slavic and some non-Slavic languages....

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 PDF
Latin 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
ALA-LC Romanization Tables Scanned text of the 1997 edition of the ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts. Ukrainian PDF
BGN/PCGN 1965 Romanization System for Ukrainian at earth-info.nga.mil
Cyrillic Transliteration Table (Ukrainian and Russian), based on both International Linguistic and ALA-LC systems
Ukrainian language in the International Phonetic Alphabet (PDF, in Ukrainian)

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