Cyrillization of Japanese

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Cyrillization of Japanese" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Japanese writing
Components
Kanji Stroke order Radicals Jōyō kanji list Kyōiku kanji Tōyō kanji Jinmeiyō kanji Hyōgai kanji
Kana Hiragana Hentaigana Katakana Man'yōgana Sōgana Gojūon
Typographic symbols Japanese punctuation Iteration mark
Uses
Syllabograms Furigana Okurigana Braille
Transliteration
Rōmaji Hepburn Kunrei-shiki / ISO 3602 Nihon-shiki JSL Wāpuro (keyboard input)
Cyrillization Polivanov system
v t e

The cyrillization of Japanese is the process of transliterating or transcribing the Japanese language into Cyrillic script in order to represent Japanese proper names or terms in various languages that use Cyrillic, as an aid to Japanese language learning in those languages or as a potential replacement for the current Japanese writing system. This can be done in an ad hoc fashion (e.g. when "sushi" is transliterated as "суши" in Russian Cyrillic or as "суші" in Ukrainian Cyrillic) or using one of a number of systems.

There are a number of cyrillization systems used by different Cyrillic alphabet-based languages, such as:

• The standard and most widely used system for cyrillization into Russian Cyrillic is known as the Polivanov system, named after the Russian and Soviet linguist Yevgeny Polivanov. One of the most arguable questions in this system is a representation of し, ち and じ into "си" (si), "ти" (ti) and "дзи" (dzi) respectively.
• The standard^{[citation needed]} and most widely^{[citation needed]} used (for example, in publications of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv) system for cyrillization into Ukrainian Cyrillic is known as Kovalenko system, named after the Ukrainian linguist Oleksandr Kovalenko [uk]. Unlike the Polivanov system,^{[citation needed]} Kovalenko system is very close to the original Japanese pronunciation.^{[citation needed]}
• Other systems [uk] are also used to transcribe Japanese into Ukrainian.