Home > Romanization of Ukrainian

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.

When romanizing, it is common to write well-known proper names using an established conventional form, rather than strictly transliterating them. The conventional form might be romanized using a different system or through another intermediate language. For example, although the spelling of Ukraine's capital city is Kyiv in official documents and on maps, many English-speakers know it as Kiev. The title of Kyiv's entry on Wikipedia has been hotly debated.

1 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.

National 1996

The official system of Ukraine, also employed by the UN and many countries' foreign services. Based on English orthography.

International Scholarly system

The system most often seen in linguistic publications about Slavic languages. It is based on the Croatian Latin alphabet.

ISO 9:1995

ISO 9 is a standard from the International Organization for Standardization, which supports most Slavic languages. It is derived from the International Scholarly system, and meant to be usable by readers of most European languages. Each Cyrillic character is represented by exactly one Latin character, so the transliteration is easily reversible, but representing all of the necessary diacritics on computers requires Unicode.

ALA-LC Romanization Tables 1997

American Library Association and Library of CongressThe Library of Congress the unofficial national library of the United States, is one of the most important libraries in the world. Originally founded as a research library for the United States Congress April 24th 1800, its original collection were the bo. Used by US and Canadian libraries for representing bibliographic information.

BGN/PCGN 1965

United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use.

IPA

The International Phonetic AlphabetThis article is about the alphabet officially used in linguistics. The NATO phonetic alphabet ("alpha bravo") has been informally and nonstandardly called the International Phonetic Alphabet as well. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a phonetic alpha precisely represents pronunciation. Requires specialized fonts.

X-SAMPAThe Extended SAM Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London. It was designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entir

Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet, for representing IPA using only ASCII characters. An international version of SAMPAThe Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for six European langua

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. Apostrof 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.