cyrillization

thumb|The Dwe (Cyrillic)|Cyrillic letter Dwe, a commonly cited example of both Cyrillization and a native language's ability to influence its imposed writing system Cyrillization or Cyrillisation is the process of rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than Cyrillic script into (a version of) the Cyrillic alphabet. Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad hoc fashion, the term "cyrillization" usually refers to a consistent system applied, for example, to transcribe names of German, Chinese, or English people and places for use in Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Macedonian or Bulgarian newspapers and books. Cyrillization is analogous to romanization, when words from a non-Latin script-using language are rendered in the Latin alphabet for use (e.g., in English, German, or Francophone literature.)

Just as with various Romanization schemes, each Cyrillization system has its own set of rules, depending on: The source language or writing system (English, French, Arabic, Hindi, Kazakh in Latin alphabet, Chinese, Japanese, etc.), The destination language or writing system (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Kazakh in Cyrillic, etc.), the goals of the systems: to render occasional foreign words (mostly personal and place names) for use in newspapers or on maps; to provide a practical approximate phonetic transcription in a phrasebook or a bilingual dictionary; or to convert a language to a Cyrillic writing system altogether (e.g., Dungan, Kazakh) Linguistic and/or political inclinations of the designers of the system (see, for example, the use—or disuse—of the letter Ґ for rendering the "G" of foreign words in Ukrainian).