Informal romanizations of Russian
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Informal or ad hoc romanizations of Russian have been in use since the early days of electronic communications, starting from early e-mail and bulletin board systems.[1] Their use faded with the advances in Russian internet that ensured support of standard romanizations of Russian[1], but resurfaced with proliferation of instant messaging, SMS and mobile phone messaging in Russia.
Due to its informal character, there was neither well-established standard nor common name. In the early days of e-mail, the humorous term "Volapuk encoding" (Russian: кодировка "воляпюк" or "волапюк", kodirovka volapyuk) was sometimes used[1].
More recently the term "translit" emerged to indiscriminately refer to both programs that transliterate Cyrillic (and other non-Latin alphabets) into Latin, as well as the result of such transliteration. The word is derived by convenience truncation of the term transliteration, and most probably its usage originated in several places. An example of early "translit" is the MS DOS program TRANSLIT [2], which run from the command prompt to convert a Cyrillic file in a Latin one using a specified transliteration table.
There are two basic varieties of romanization of Russian: transliterations and Leetspeak-type of rendering of Russian text. The latter one is often heavily saturated with common English words, which are often much shorter than the corresponding Russian ones, and is sometimes referred to as Runglish or Russlish.
