Latin alphabet for Ukrainian

A Latin alphabet for the Ukrainian language (called Latynka) has been proposed or imposed several times in the history in Ukraine, but has never challenged the conventional Cyrillic Ukrainian alphabet.

The Ukrainian literary language has been written with the Cyrillic script, in a tradition going back to the introduction of Christianity and the Old Church Slavonic language to Kievan Rus’. Proposals for Latinization, if not imposed for outright political reasons, have always been politically charged, and have never been generally accepted. Although some proposals to create an official Latin alphabet for Ukrainian language have been expressed lately by national intelligentsia. Technically, most have resembled the linguistically related Polish and Czech alphabets.

While superficially similar to a Latin alphabet, transliteration of Ukrainian from Cyrillic into the Latin script (or romanization) is usually not intended for native speakers, and may be designed for certain academic requirements or technical constraints. See romanization of Ukrainian.

Ukrainian was occasionally written in the Latin script as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in publications using the Polish and Czech alphabets. In the nineteenth century, there were attempts to introduce the Latin script into Ukrainian writing, by Josyp Łozynśkyj, a Ukrainian scholar and priest from Lviv (Josyp Łozynski Ivanovyč, Ruskoje wesile, 1834), Tomasz Padura, and other Polish-Ukrainian romantic poets.

The use of the Latin script for Ukrainian was promoted by authorities in Galicia under the Austrian Habsburg Empire. Franc Miklošič developed a Latin alphabet for Ukrainian in 1852, based on the Polish and Czech alphabets (adopting Czech č, š, ž, dž, ď, ť, Polish ś, ź, ć, ń, and ľ following the same pattern). This initiative was taken into interest by Czech politician Josef Jireček, who managed to gain support for the project in the Imperial Ministry of Interior. As part of a Polonization campaign in Galicia during the period of neo-absolutist rule after 1849, Viceroy Agenor Gołuchowski attempted to impose this Latin alphabet on Ukrainian publications in 1859. This started a fierce publicly debated "War of the Alphabets", and in the end the Latin alphabet was rejected. Ukrainian books continued to be published in Cyrillic, while the Latin alphabet was used in special editions "for those who read Polish only" in Galicia, Podlaskie, and the Chełm region.

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