ISO 9

The ISO international standard ISO 9 establishes a system for the transliteration into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters constituting the alphabets of many Slavic and 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 supersedes the edition of 1986.^[1]

ISO 9:1995, or GOST 7.79 System A

^[2] 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 pre-composed 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 various Slavic, Iranian, Romance, Turkic, Uralic, Mongolic, Caucasian, Tungusic, Paleosiberian and other languages of the former USSR which are written in Cyrillic.

Example

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

GOST 7.79 System B

^[2] 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

This standard (System B) appears to have been used in 2014 for the transliteration of street names on street signs in Moscow; its unusual appearance and non-intuitive sound values gave rise to criticism in the media.^[5]

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)^[6]
•  Kazakhstan (GOST 7.79)
•  Kyrgyzstan (GOST 7.79)
•  Tajikistan (GOST 7.79)
•  Turkmenistan (GOST 7.79)
•  Uzbekistan (GOST 7.79)

ISO/R 9

ISO Recommendation No. 9, published 1954 and revised 1968, 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 (where it occurred in the pre-1945 orthography).

Russian and Belarusian

ъ is not transliterated at the end of a word (where it occurred in the pre-1918 orthography).

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

Notes

1. 1 2 "ISO 9:1995: Information and documentation -- Transliteration of Cyrillic characters into Latin characters -- Slavic and non-Slavic languages". International Organization for Standardization. Retrieved 13 Apr 2012. 
2. 1 2 ГОСТ 7.79-2000: Система стандартов по информации, библиотечному и издательскому делу. Правила транслитерации кирилловского письма латинским алфавитом [GOST 7.79-2000: System of standards on information, librarianship and publishing. Rules of transliteration of Cyrillic script by Latin alphabet] (in Russian). Retrieved 13 Apr 2012.  - authentic Russian version of ISO 9
3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 The “informative” Annex A of ISO 9:1995 uses ISO 5426 0x52 hook to left which can be mapped to Unicode’s comma below U+0326 (while the ISO 5426 also has 0x50 cedilla which can be mapped to Unicode’s cedilla U+0327), it also uses ISO 5426 0x53 hook to right which can be mapped to Unicode’s ogonek U+0328. See for example Evertype.com’s ISO 5426 mapping to Unicode or Joan M. Aliprand’s Finalized Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426 and ISO/IEC 10646-1.
4. 1 2 Evertype.com: ISO 5426 mapping to Unicode; Joan M. Aliprand: Finalized Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426 and ISO/IEC 10646-1; The Unicode Standard: Spacing Modifier Letters.
5. ↑ Москва готовится к оккупации, иначе происходящее не объяснить ("Moscow is preparing for occupation - otherwise one can't explain what goes on")
6. ↑ "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')

External links

• Online Russian Transliterator, various systems (Russian alphabet only)
• Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts – A collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pedersen. PDF reference charts include ISO 9.
• Transliteration of Russian into various European languages
• 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 covering a variety of writing systems. Transliteration according to several standards including ISO 9 and DIN 1460 for Cyrillic.
• (in German) IDS (Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz, 2001) Katalogisierungsregeln IDS (KIDS), Anhänge, “IDS G.4: Transliteration der slavischen kyrillischen Alphabete”. Universität Zürich. URL accessed on 29-02-2012 (PDF format, in German)—ISO/R 9 1968 standardization of scientific transliteration.
• RUS1.NET — 1:1 (univocal) transliteration map for learners of Russian, links to free auto-translit/IME tools for chrome/Firefox.