ISO 9

The international standard ISO 9 establishes a system for the transliteration into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters constituting the alphabets of many Slavic and some non-Slavic languages.^[1]

The major advantage ISO 9 has over other competing systems is its univocal system of one character for one character equivalents (by the use of diacritics), which faithfully represents the original spelling and allows for reverse transliteration, even if the language is unknown.

Earlier versions of the standard, ISO/R 9:1954, ISO/R 9:1968 and ISO 9:1986, were more closely based on the international scholarly system for linguistics (scientific transliteration), but have diverged in favour of unambiguous transliteration over phonemic representation. The edition of 1995 cancels and replaces the edition of 1986.

ISO 9:1995

The standard features three mapping tables: the first covers contemporary Slavic languages, the second older Slavic orthographies (excluding letters from the first), and the third non-Slavic languages (including most letters from the first). Several Cyrillic characters included in ISO 9 are not available as precomposed characters in Unicode, neither are some of the transliterations; combining diacritical marks have to be used in these cases. Unicode, on the other hand, includes some historic characters that are not dealt with in ISO 9.

The following combined table shows characters for at least Abkhaz, Altay, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Buryat, Chuvash, Karachay-Balkar, Macedonian, Moldavian, Mongolian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Udmurt, Ukrainian, and all Caucasian languages using páločka.

Example

Here is an example transliteration. The text in Cyrillic is the chorus of the hymn of the Russian Federation:

GOST 7.79

GOST 7.79 contains two transliteration tables.

System A

one Cyrillic character to one Latin character, some with diacritics – identical to ISO 9:1995

System B

one Cyrillic character to one or many Latin characters without diacritics

National adoptions

The verbatim translated text of ISO 9 is adopted as an inter-state standard in the countries listed below (the national designation is shown in parentheses). Other transcription schemes are also used in practice, though.

•  Russia (GOST 7.79)
•  Armenia (GOST 7.79)
•  Azerbaijan (GOST 7.79)
•  Belarus (GOST 7.79–2000, adopted 2003-03-01)^[2]
•  Kazakhstan (GOST 7.79)
•  Kyrgyzstan (GOST 7.79)
•  Tajikistan (GOST 7.79)
•  Turkmenistan (GOST 7.79)
•  Uzbekistan (GOST 7.79)

ISO/R 9:1968

This is an older version of the standard, with different transliteration for different Slavic languages, reflecting their phonemic differences. It is closer to the original international system of slavist scientific transliteration.

The languages covered are Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Macedonian. ISO 9:1995 is shown for comparison.

Bulgarian

ъ and ѫ are not transliterated at the end of a word.

Russian and Belarusian

ъ is not transliterated at the end of a word.

Sub-standards

ISO/R 9 - 1968 permits some deviations from the main standard. In the table below, they are listed in the columns sub-standard 1 and sub-standard 2.

• The first sub-standard defines some language-dependent transliterations for Russian (ru), Ukrainian (uk), Belarusian (be) and Bulgarian (bg).
• The second sub-standard permits, in countries where tradition favours it, a set of alternative transliterations, but only as a group.

See also

• Romanization of Russian
• List of ISO transliterations
• GOST standards

References

1. ^ Abkhaz, Altay, Buryat, Chuvash, Karachay-Balkar, Moldavian, Mongolian, Udmurt, and all Caucasian languages using palochka
2. ^ "Система стандартов по информации, библиотечному и издательскому делу (СИБИД), действующих в Республике Беларусь", item 55 (Sistema standartov po informacii, bibliotečnomu i izdatel'skomu delu (SIBID), dejstvuûŝih v Respublike Belarus')

• IDS (Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz, 2001) Katalogisierungsregeln IDS (KIDS), Anhänge, “IDS G.4: Transliteration der slavischen kyrillischen Alphabete”. Universität Zürich. URL accessed on 2006-02-16 (PDF format, in German)—ISO/R 9 1968 standardization of scientific transliteration.

External links

• Online Russian Transliterator, which supports ISO 9 Standard - "ISO 9" transliteration method must be selected.
• Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts - A collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pedersen. PDF reference charts include ISO 9.
• ISO 9:1995 at ISO.org
• Umschrift des russischen Alphabets—Russian transliteration in several systems, including DIN 1460 (1982) [= ISO/R9:1968].
• Transliteration of Russian into various European languages
• Online Transliteration (JavaScript)
• CyrAcademisator Bi-directional online transliteration of Russian for ALA-LC (diacritics), scientific, ISO/R 9, ISO 9, GOST 7.79B and others. Supports Old Slavonic characters
• Lingua::Translit Perl module and online service covering a variety of writing systems. Transliteration according to several standards including ISO 9 and DIN 1460 for Cyrillic.