BGN/PCGN romanization of Russian

BGN/PCGN romanization system for Russian is a method for romanization of Cyrillic Russian texts, that is, their transliteration into the Latin alphabet as used in the English language.

There are a number of systems for romanization of Russian—the BGN/PCGN system is relatively intuitive for anglophones to pronounce. It is part of the larger set of BGN/PCGN romanizations, which includes methods for twenty-nine different languages. It was developed by the United States Board on Geographic Names and by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use. The portion of the system pertaining to the Russian language was adopted by BGN in 1944, and by PCGN in 1947.Clarifyme|date=September 2008|reason=Who are BGN and PCGN? Link to them.

This romanization of Russian can be rendered using only the basic letters and punctuation found on English-language keyboards: no diacritics or unusual letters are required, although the interpunct character (·) can optionally be used to avoid some ambiguity.

In many publications a simplified form of the system is used to render English versions of Russian names, typically converting "ë" to "yo", simplifying "-iy" and "-yy" endings to "-y", and omitting apostrophes for "ъ" and "ь". Edward Allworth, for instance, uses a romanization system based upon BGN/PCGN in his 1971 book "Nationalities of the Soviet East—Publications and Writing Systems"; he transliterates Cyrillic "е" and "ё" always to their Latin look-alikes "e" and "ë" respectively and substitutes an "i" for the "y" of "й, ю" and "я", which makes the system also close to a version of the ALA-LC system without diacritic marks.

The following table describes the system and provides examples.

ee also

*ISO 9
*GOST 16876-71

References

*U.S. Board on Geographic Names Foreign Names Committee Staff, 1994. "Romanization Systems and Roman-Script Spelling Conventions", pp. 84–85.