Transliterating Ukrainian Names After the 2010 Spelling Reform

Ukraine’s official transliteration is not a convention or a preference. It was fixed by a Cabinet of Ministers resolution in January 2010, it is what passports and official documents use, and it differs from the Russian-derived spellings that dominate older English-language text on exactly the letters that appear in most Ukrainian names.

The instrument and its date

The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted Resolution No. 55 on 27 January 2010, on the streamlining of the transliteration of the Ukrainian alphabet into Latin script. It establishes the official table for rendering Ukrainian in Latin characters and is the basis for the Latin spelling of names on Ukrainian travel documents. The text is published on the Verkhovna Rada’s legislation portal — Resolution No. 55 of 27 January 2010 — and amendments to it are published in the same place, which is where to check the current text rather than any secondary summary.

Before it, Latin renderings of Ukrainian names were governed by earlier and less binding arrangements, and in practice most English-language material used spellings that had arrived through Russian. That is the gap this page is about: the resolution is fifteen years old and a great deal of text predating it is still in circulation, so both forms are well represented in anything trained on the open web.

The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, whose Working Group on Romanization Systems publishes the status of national romanisation systems, tracks the Ukrainian system among those in official use for geographical names; that working group’s reports are the right place to confirm the international status of any system named here.

What the table specifies

The letters that distinguish it from any Russian-oriented table:

Г = H      (not G — the single most visible difference)
Ґ = G      (the separate letter that is genuinely G)
Ж = Zh     З = Z       И = Y       І = I
Х = Kh     Ц = Ts      Ч = Ch      Ш = Sh      Щ = Shch
Є = Ye / ie          Ї = Yi / i
Й = Y / i            Ю = Yu / iu          Я = Ya / ia

The soft sign and the apostrophe are not rendered at all.

Two of those lines are omissions rather than mappings, and they account for a surprising share of the differences people notice. The soft sign ь is simply not written, so Ольга is Olha — the г becomes h and the ь contributes nothing — where Russian-mediated habit gives Olga. The apostrophe, which in Ukrainian marks that a preceding consonant is not softened, is likewise dropped, so Знам’янка is Znamianka and В’ячеслав is Viacheslav. Both omissions are lossy in the same way the ICAO table is lossy: forward application is deterministic, and the Cyrillic cannot be reconstructed from the Latin.

The resolution’s scope is worth being precise about, because it is broader than passports. It establishes the table for rendering the Ukrainian alphabet in Latin script generally, which is why it governs the official Latin forms of geographical names as well as of people — the reason Kyiv is not merely a preference that news organisations adopted, but the form Ukraine specifies for its own capital.

Г → H is the change that carries most of the visible effect, because г is common and because the Russian-mediated habit was to write it g. It is why the capital is Kyiv rather than Kiev, why Ігор is Ihor and not Igor, and why Сергій is Serhii and not Sergey.

The position-dependent rule

Five letters have two renderings and which one applies depends on position in the word: the Y-initial form at the start of a word, the bare vowel form everywhere else. This is the rule most often misapplied, including by systems that have otherwise adopted the table.

Ukrainian    official Latin   why
Юлія         Yuliia           Yu- initial, then -ia medial: Yu+l+i+ia
Олексій      Oleksii          -ій at the end gives -ii
Київ         Kyiv             И = Y, ї medial = i
Запоріжжя    Zaporizhzhia     -жжя = -zhzhia
Ірина        Iryna            І = I, и = y
Євген        Yevhen           Є- initial = Ye-, г = h

The doubled vowels in Yuliia and Oleksii are the signature of the system and the thing people most often assume is a typo. They are two separate letters landing next to each other, in the same way the Russian travel-document table produces IULIIA — both tables apply per character with no smoothing.

The forms it replaced

A model’s default output on Ukrainian names very often follows neither the 2010 table nor any single older standard, but the conventional English spellings that entered the language through Russian. Those are the ones to look for:

• Kiev for Київ, where the official form is Kyiv. Most major English-language style guides moved to Kyiv during the 2010s and 2020s, so both forms are heavily represented in training data with the older form dominating anything before that.
• Lvov or Lemberg for Львів, where the official form is Lviv.
• Kharkov for Харків, official Kharkiv; Zaporozhye for Запоріжжя, official Zaporizhzhia.
• Sergey, Igor, Yuliya, Alexey for Сергій, Ігор, Юлія, Олексій — where the official forms are Serhii, Ihor, Yuliia, Oleksii.

Separately, ISO 9:1995 will give a third answer again — Юлія as Ûlìâ — because it is a language-neutral reversible table that takes no view on which Slavic language it is looking at — the reversibility trade that separates the Cyrillic romanisation standards from one another. If you see diacritics, the output is not following the Ukrainian national system.

Checking an output in one glance

Three checks, each of which takes a second and each of which catches a different failure.

1. Search the output for Kiev, Kharkov, Lvov and Zaporozhye. A hit means the model is on the Russian-mediated forms, and every other name in the batch should be assumed to be too.
2. Look for a g. Ukrainian ґ is rare, so a g in a Ukrainian name is nearly always г rendered by the wrong table.
3. Look for yu or ya in the middle of a word. The position-dependent rule says those forms belong only at the start, so Yuliya is diagnostic where Yuliia is correct.

As with Russian, none of this applies to a name that has to match a document. Where a person holds a passport, the Latin spelling on it is authoritative even if it predates the current table or reflects a requested retention of an earlier spelling, and it must be copied rather than generated — the reasoning is the same as in transliterating Russian names for a passport form.