Romanization or Latinization of Ukrainian denotes a system for representing the Ukrainian language in Latin letters. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, a variation of Cyrillic.

Romanization may be employed to represent Ukrainian text or pronunciation for non-Ukrainian readers, on computer systems that can't reproduce Cyrillic characters, or for typists who aren't familiar with the Ukrainian keyboard layout. Methods of romanization include transliteration, representing written text, and transcription, representing the spoken word.

Conventional romanization of proper names

In some contexts, it is common to write well-known proper names using an established conventional form, rather than strictly transliterating them. A conventional Latin-alphabet spelling may be transliterated using a different system or originate in another intermediate language, such as Polish, transliterated from Russian, transliterated into German, etc. For example, although the spelling of Ukraine's capital city is Kyiv in official documents and on maps, many English-speakers are more familiar with the transliteration from Russian, Kiev. The title of Kyiv's entry on Wikipedia has been hotly debated.

Ukrainian personal names are usually rendered into English phonetically. The most common method is similar to BGN/PCGN transliteration, except the soft sign and apostrophe are dropped, iotified diphthongs я, є, ий, ій, ї, йо, ю (scientific transliteration: ja, je, yj, ij, ji, jo, ju) are rendered with i or y in different contexts, doubled letters are often simplified to one.

Romanization systems

Some commonly-used systems for Romanizing Ukrainian. Some of these are revised periodically, and so this list includes the date of the latest version.

Transliteration

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

National 1996

The official system of Ukraine, also employed by the UN 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.

Requires only ASCII characters.

International Scholarly system

Also called "scientific transliteration ", this system is most often seen in linguistic publications on Slavic languages. It was codified in 19th century Prussian Instructions for libraries (Preußische Instruktionen , or PI), and is based on the Croatian Latin alphabet.

Representing all of the necessary diacritics on computers requires Unicode.

ISO 9:1995

ISO 9 is a standard from the International Organization for Standardization, which supports most Slavic languages in a single transliteration table. It is derived from the Scholarly system, and is meant to be usable by readers of most European languages. Each Cyrillic character is represented by exactly one unique Latin character, so the transliteration is reliably reversible.

ISO 9 considers only graphemes and disregards phonemic differences. So, for example, "Г" (Ukrainian He or Russian Ge) is always represented by the transliteration "G".

Representing all of the necessary diacritics on computers requires Unicode.

ALA-LC Romanization Tables 1997

American Library Association and Library of Congress. Used by US and Canadian libraries for representing bibliographic information.

Requires Unicode for connecting diacritics, but these are often omitted in practice.

BGN/PCGN 1965

United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use. Pronunciation is intuitive for English-speakers.

Requires only ASCII characters.

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. Requires a special Unicode font.

X-SAMPA

Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet, for representing IPA using only ASCII characters. An international version of SAMPA.

Table of romanization systems

Notes for the Ukrainian National system

1. Transliteration can be rendered in a simplified form:
   1. Doubled consonants ж, х, ц, ч, ш are simplified (e.g. Запоріжжя—Zaporizhia).
   2. Apostrophe and soft sign are omitted, except for ьо and ьї which are always rendered as ’o and ’i.
2. gh is used in the romanization of зг (zgh), avoiding confusion with ж (zh).
3. The second variant is used at the beginning of a word.

Notes for ALA/LC

4. When applied strictly, ALA/LC requires the use of two-character combining diacritics, but in practice these are often omitted.

See also

• Writing system
• Transliteration of Russian into English

External links

• Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts A collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pederson. PDF reference charts for many languages' transliteration systems. Ukrainian PDF.
• Ukrainian National transliteration (in 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.
• Transliteration history - history of the transliteration of Slavic languages into Latin alphabets.