The Ukrainian Latin alphabet is the form of the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

used for writing, transliteration, and retransliteration of Ukrainian. The Latin alphabet has been proposed or imposed several times in the history in

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 ...

, but it has never replaced the dominant Cyrillic

Ukrainian alphabet The Ukrainian alphabet () is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th ...

Characteristics

Standard Ukrainian has been written with 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 ...

in a tradition going back to the introduction of Christianity and

Old Church Slavonic Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic ( ) is the first Slavic languages, Slavic literary language and the oldest extant written Slavonic language attested in literary sources. It belongs to the South Slavic languages, South Slavic subgroup of the ...

Kievan Rus' Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus,. * was the first East Slavs, East Slavic state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical At ...

. Proposals for Latinization, if not imposed for outright political reasons, have always been politically charged and have never been generally accepted, although some proposals to create an official Latin alphabet for Ukrainian have been expressed lately by national

intelligentsia The intelligentsia is a status class composed of the university-educated people of a society who engage in the complex mental labours by which they critique, shape, and lead in the politics, policies, and culture of their society; as such, the i ...

. While superficially similar to a Latin alphabet,

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 ...

of Ukrainian from Cyrillic into the Latin script (or ''

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 ...

'') is usually not intended for native speakers, and may be designed for certain academic requirements or technical constraints. The Mozilla Add-ons website published the ''Ukrajinsjka Latynka'' extension to transliterate Ukrainian texts from Cyrillic to Latin script on web pages.

History

19th century

In the nineteenth century, there were attempts to introduce the Latin script into Ukrainian writing, by J. Lozinskiy (), a Ukrainian scholar and priest from Lviv (Josyp Łozyński Ivanovyč, ''Ruskoje wesile'', 1834),''J. Lozinskiy.'
Ruskoje wesile.
W Peremyszły, w Typografii Władycznój gr. kat. 1835 Tomasz Padura. The use of the Latin script for Ukrainian was promoted by authorities in Galicia under the Austrian

Habsburg Empire The Habsburg monarchy, also known as Habsburg Empire, or Habsburg Realm (), was the collection of empires, kingdoms, duchies, counties and other polities (composite monarchy) that were ruled by the House of Habsburg. From the 18th century it is ...

Franz Miklosich Franz Miklosich (, also known in Slovene as ; 20 November 1813 – 7 March 1891) was a Slovenian philologist and rector of the University of Vienna. Early life Miklosich was born in the small village of Radomerščak near the Lower Styrian town ...

developed a Latin alphabet for Ukrainian in 1852, based on the Polish and Czech alphabets (adopting Czech ''č, š, ž, dž, ď, ť,'' Polish ''ś, ź, ć, ń,'' and ''ľ'' following the same pattern). Czech politician

Josef Jireček Josef Jireček (9 October 1825, in Vysoké Mýto – 25 November 1888, in Prague) was a Czech scholar. He was born in Vysoké Mýto (then part of the Austrian Empire). He entered the Prague Bureau of Education in 1850 and became department minis ...

took an interest in this concept and managed to gain support for the project in the Imperial Ministry of Interior. As part of a

Polonization Polonization or Polonisation ()In Polish historiography, particularly pre-WWII (e.g., L. Wasilewski. As noted in Смалянчук А. Ф. (Smalyanchuk 2001) Паміж краёвасцю і нацыянальнай ідэяй. Польскі ...

campaign in Galicia during the period of neo-absolutist rule after 1849, Viceroy Agenor Gołuchowski attempted to impose this Latin alphabet on Ukrainian publications in 1859. This started a fierce publicly debated

Alphabetical War The Alphabet War, also called the Alphabet Blizzard, was a controversy in the 19th century among Galician Ukrainians, which concerned attempts to romanize the Ukrainian alphabet. The name may be derived from the discussions that took place in t ...

(), and in the end the Latin alphabet was rejected. A Latin alphabet for Ukrainian publications was also imposed in Romanian

Bessarabia Bessarabia () is a historical region in Eastern Europe, bounded by the Dniester river on the east and the Prut river on the west. About two thirds of Bessarabia lies within modern-day Moldova, with the Budjak region covering the southern coa ...

Bukovina Bukovina or ; ; ; ; , ; see also other languages. is a historical region at the crossroads of Central and Eastern Europe. It is located on the northern slopes of the central Eastern Carpathians and the adjoining plains, today divided betwe ...

and

Dobrudja Dobruja or Dobrudja (; or ''Dobrudža''; , or ; ; Dobrujan Tatar: ''Tomrîğa''; Ukrainian language, Ukrainian and ) is a Geography, geographical and historical region in Southeastern Europe that has been divided since the 19th century betw ...

, Hungarian Zakarpattia. In Ukraine under the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

Mykhailo Drahomanov Mykhailo Petrovych Drahomanov (; 18 September 1841 – 2 July 1895) was a Ukrainian intellectual and public figure. As an academic, Drahomanov was an economist, historian, philosopher, and ethnographer, while as a public intellectual he was a ...

promoted a purely phonemic

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

alphabet (the '' Drahomanivka'') including the Latin letter ''ј'' in 1876, replacing the digraphs ''я, є, ю, ї'' with ''ја, је, јu, јі'', similar to the earlier Karadžić reform of the

Serbian alphabet The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (, ), also known as the Serbian script, (, ), is a standardized variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language. It originated in medieval Serbia and was significantly reformed in the 19th ce ...

20th century

Soviet Ukraine The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, abbreviated as the Ukrainian SSR, UkrSSR, and also known as Soviet Ukraine or just Ukraine, was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1991. Under the Soviet one-party m ...

, during the 1927 orthographical conference in

Kharkiv Kharkiv, also known as Kharkov, is the second-largest List of cities in Ukraine, city in Ukraine.

, linguists Maik Yohansen, Borys Tkachenko, and Mykola Nakonechnyi proposed the application of the more "international" Latin script to Ukrainian, but the idea was opposed by Soviet government representatives.

21st century

Ukrainian National transliteration

This is the official transliteration system of

, also employed by the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

and many countries' foreign services. It is currently widely used to represent Ukrainian geographic names 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. The first version of the system was codified in Decision No. 9 of the Ukrainian Committee on Issues of Legal Terminology on 19 April 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. The current 2010 version is used for transliterating all proper names was approved as Resolution 55 of the

Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine (), commonly referred to as the Government of Ukraine (), is the highest body of state Executive (government), executive power in Ukraine. As the Cabinet of Ministers of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republi ...

, on 27 January 2010.Resolution no. 55
of the

, 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 The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) is one of the nine expert groups of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and deals with the national and international standardization of geographical names. ...

), held in New York on 30 July and 10 August 2012, 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 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 The North Crimean Canal, formerly known as the North Crimean Canal of the Lenin's Komsomol of Ukraine in Soviet times, is a land improvement canal for irrigation and watering of Kherson Oblast in southern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula. The c ...

''.

DSTU 9112:2021

On 1 April 2022, the "Cyrillic-Latin transliteration and Latin-Cyrillic retransliteration of Ukrainian texts. Writing rules" ( SSOU 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 The State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine, SSTL () is the main academic library of Ukraine and is part of the system of scientific and technical information of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. The purpose of the State ...

. 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

, in which "Ukrainian will soon, along with other European languages, take its rightful place in multilingual natural language processing scenarios, including machine translation."

Variations

Abecadło

Some letters borrowed from

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Polish people, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken * Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin ...

were used in the Ukrainian Łatynka as stated above, which also has a close resemblance to the Belarusian

Łacinka The Belarusian Latin alphabet or Łacinka (from , BGN/PCGN romanization of Belarusian, BGN/PCGN: , ) for the Latin script in general is the Latin script as used to write Belarusian. It is similar to the Sorbian alphabet and incorporates feat ...

. Although never broadly accepted, it was used mostly by Ukrainians living in territories near Poland (where it was called ''Abecadło''). "Latynska abetka"
/ref> As example, the Introduction of Josyp Łozynśkyj's ''Ruskoje Wesile'' ('Ruthenian Wedding', 1834): : Perédmowa : W tym opysi skazuju, jaksia wesile po sełach meży prostym ruskim ludom widprawlaje. Ne mohu jednako utrymowaty, jakoby toj sposób wesile widprawlaty wsiude newidminni był zachowanym; bo hdenekodyj szczoś dodajut, hdeinde szczoś wypuskajut, a znowu hdeinde szczoś widminiajut. Syła w mojej syli było, starał-jemsia w rozmaitych misciach obradki i pisny ruskoho wesila póznaty i pérekonał-jemsia że prynajmni szczo do hołownych obradkiw i pisnéj wsiude tymże samym sposobom wesilesia widprawlaje. I toj sposób opysałjem w nynijszуj knyżoczci dodajuczy jednako hdenekodyj i miscowyi widminy. Moim najperszym i najbohatszym a nawet́ i nihdy newyczerpanym źridłom, z kotorohom tyi widomosty czerpał, było dopytowanie po sełach tych ludej, kotryi czasto na wesilach bywały i wesilnyi uŕady pistowały. Nykotorych obradkiw był jem sam okozritelnym świdkom.

Jireček's project

proposed an alphabet based more closely on

Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus *Czech (surnam ...

orthography (except some letters like ć, ń, ś, ź). # For ''є'' which is used in place of Old Church Slavonic ѧ or Polish ę (e.g. ''sěhnuty, děkovaly, ščěstje, devěť''). # For ''л'' in old Slavic ''ъl'' + cons. (e.g. ''vołk''). Jireček mistakenly believed there are three types of L in Ukrainian – hard (hart) l, soft (erweicht) ľ and potentiated hard (potenziert hart) ł. # For ''і'', which derives from Old Church Slavonic ''о'' (as Jireček distinguished і < о and і < е, ѣ; e.g. ''кість - küsť, гвіздь - hvüźď''). # In foreign words only.

Modern versions

In modern Ukraine, use of Latin alphabets for the Ukrainian language is very rare. However, discussions of a united format of Latynka and its status still continue.

Comparison

Comparison of several romanization systems for Ukrainian and historical versions of Ukrainian Latin alphabet in example of the State Anthem of Ukraine.

Official Ukrainian romanization systems

Non-Ukrainian romanization systems

Historical Latin Alphabets

Gallery

File:Kobzar 1940 (łatynka).jpg, "

Kobzar A ''kobzar'' ( ; ) was an itinerant Ukrainian bard who sang to his own accompaniment, played on a multistringed kobza or bandura. Tradition The professional kobzar tradition was established during the Hetmanate Era around the sixteenth cen ...

" by Taras Shevchenko, published in 1940 (abecadło) File:Ruśkyj Kalendar dla tych, szczo ne znajut' ruśkoho pyśma (1910).jpg, "Ruthenian Calendar" for those who did not understand Cyrillic, 1910 (abecadło) File:У полі, гей, у полі! (рукопис Федьковича).jpg, Authograph of a poem by

Yuriy Fedkovych Osyp-Yuriy Adalbertovych Fedkovych (, 8 August 1834, Putyla - 11 January 1888, Chernivtsi) was a Ukrainian writer, poet, folklorist and translator. Biography Fedkovych lived in Chernivtsi, where he was a closed associate of Rudolf Neubauer, th ...

(gajica and abecadło) File:Molitvennik dlyá gyitej (1904).jpg, A prayer book for children published in

Carpathian Ruthenia Transcarpathia (, ) is a historical region on the border between Central and Eastern Europe, mostly located in western Ukraine's Zakarpattia Oblast. From the Hungarian Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin, conquest of the Carpathian Basin ...

, 1904 (Hungarian alphabet) File:Istorja Polszczy, Łytwy i Rusy (1879).jpg, History of Poland, Lithuania and Ruthenia, 1879 (abecadło)

Notes

References

External links

*

(scroll to bottom of page) which transcribes Ukrainian into Latynka
Online romanizer of Ukrainian texts and websites

Ukraïnśka Latynka Browser Extension
— automatic transliteration of web pages, provides several romanization tables and a rule editor {{Ukrainian orthography Ukrainian orthography Latin alphabets