Romanization of Ukrainian

The romanization of Ukrainian, or Latinization of Ukrainian, is the representation of the Ukrainian language in Latin letters. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian 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 native Ukrainian Latin alphabet, usually based on those used by West Slavic languages, but none have caught on.

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. 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, 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''.

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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. 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)
/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 is 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 2020.

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

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 table.

Transcription

Transcription is the representation of the spoken word. Phonological, or phonemic, transcription represents the phonemes, 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 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, or Library of Congress (in North America), or, less commonly, the British Standard system. Such a simplified system usually omits diacritics 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 where an apostrophe is punctuation, in the Ukrainian language 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'' 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

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See also

* Belarusian alphabet
*Cyrillic alphabets
*Cyrillic script
* Faux Cyrillic
*Greek alphabet
*Macedonian alphabet
*Montenegrin alphabet
*Romanization of Belarusian
* Romanization of Bulgarian
*Romanization of Greek
*Romanization of Macedonian
*Romanization of Russian
*Ukrainian alphabet
*Ukrainian Latin alphabet
*Russian alphabet
*Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic
*Serbian Cyrillic alphabet

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 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 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