Informal romanizations of Cyrillic

Due to its informal character, there was neither a well-established standard nor a common name. In the early days of e-mail, the humorous term "Volapuk encoding" (Russian: кодировка "воляпюк" or "волапюк", romanized: 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 an abbreviation of the term transliteration, and most probably its usage originated in several places. An example of early "translit" is the DOS program TRANSLIT [2] by Jan Labanowski, which runs from the command prompt to convert a Cyrillic file to 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.

Translit is a method of encoding Cyrillic letters with Latin ones. The term is derived from transliteration, the system of replacing letters of one alphabet with letters of another. Translit found its way into web forums, chats, messengers, emails, MMORPGs and other network games. Some Cyrillic web sites had a translit version for cases of encoding problems.

As computer and network technologies developed support for the Cyrillic script, translit fell into disrepute. Sometimes translit users were ignored or even banned in Cyrillic-using communities.

Translit received its last development impulse with the increasing availability of mobile phones in Cyrillic-using countries. At first, the situation was the same as with computers; neither mobile phones nor mobile network operators supported Cyrillic. Although mobile phone technology now supports Unicode including all variants of Cyrillic alphabets, a single SMS in Unicode is limited to 70 characters, whereas a Latinate SMS can have up to 160 characters. If a message exceeds the character limit, it is split into multiple parts. That makes messages written in Cyrillic more expensive.

Sometimes ⟨y⟩, ⟨yu⟩, ⟨yo⟩, ⟨ye⟩, ⟨ya⟩ serve as transliteration for ⟨й⟩, ⟨ю⟩, ⟨ё⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨я⟩.

Lately a more aggressive form of translit appeared, its identifying characteristic being the use of numbers to substitute some of the letters. For example, 4 reads as "ch" and is used to translit letter "ч", from the transliteration of the word "four" in Russian ("Chetyre", четыре), or, arguably, the appearance of the letter similar to that of four in Arabic numerals. Also, a number can substitute its whole name as part of a word: "sov7" for "sovsem" ("completely") or "posmo3" for "posmotri" ("have a look", imperative).

Such translit is often so distorted that native speakers have trouble reading it. The use of translit is forbidden on many Internet forums.[3]

Russia and other former Soviet republics adopted the ISO 9 transliteration standard for official use (under the designation 7.79-2000), replacing the old Soviet GOST 16876-71.

Volapuk encoding (Russian: кодировка "волапюк", kodirovka "volapük") or latinitsa (латиница) is a slang term for rendering the letters of the Cyrillic script with Latin ones. Unlike Translit, in which characters are replaced to sound the same, in volapuk characters can be replaced to look or sound the same.

The Russian Chat Alphabet is a fast-to-type mix of translit and Volapuk, being translit mostly, but giving the option to replace some 2 or 3 character transliterations with shorter 1 character counterparts from Volapuk. This speeds up typing; however, in some cases characters may be Volapuk-encoded, making text appear incorrectly and therefore be harder or impossible to read. In Russia and countries where Russian is used regularly to communicate via mobile phone and chat room, it is used as an alternative and free style of transliteration. It also works around the limitations of programs and/or devices where a Cyrillic keyboard is not available.

Within Russia, one reason to use transliteration for Russian text is that mobile characters allow for more Latin characters than Cyrillic ones per SMS: Latin and capital Greek letters are covered by the GSM seven-bit alphabet, allowing up to 160 such characters in a message, while Cyrillic letters are not, requiring a 16-bit encoding that limits messages to 70 characters. In this case, the focus is of course on getting one Latin character (of which there are 26) for each Cyrillic character (of which there are 33 in Russian, and additional characters in Ukrainian and other languages using Cyrillic script). Only those used for Russian are exemplified here.

Where variants are given, the first is most common and the last is less common, although trends change quickly and differ from person to person. Lack of standardization is the biggest weakness of this informal transliterations, as different styles contradict each other and can make reading slower than necessary.

• Transliteration
• Romanization of Russian
• Arabic chat alphabet
• Romanization of Ukrainian
• Faux Cyrillic – The reverse, e.g. "ЯUSSIAИ"
• Mojibake
• Greeklish

• Frolov, A.V. and Frolov, G.V. Electronic Mail. Your Internet Companion (А.В. Фролов, Г.В. Фролов, "Электронная почта. Ваш спутник в Интернете") Russkaya Redaktsiya Publishers (Русская Редакция) (2000) ISBN 5-7502-0156-2, Chapter 6 online (in Russian)

• RUS1.NET — 1:1 (univocal) transliteration map for learners of Russian, links to free auto-transliteration and IME tools for Firefox and Chrome.
• Example on-line transliterator (in Russian)