The ISOinternational standardISO 9 establishes a system for the transliteration into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters constituting the alphabets of many Slavic and non-Slavic languages. Published on February 23, 1995, the major advantage ISO 9 has over other competing systems is its univocal system of one character for one character equivalents, which faithfully represents the original spelling and allows for reverse transliteration, even if the language is unknown. Earlier versions of the standard, ISO/R 9:1954, ISO/R 9:1968 and ISO 9:1986, were more closely based on the international scholarly system for linguistics, but have diverged in favour of unambiguous transliteration over phonemic representation. The edition of 1995 supersedes the edition of 1986.
ISO 9:1995
The standard features three mapping tables: the first covers contemporary Slavic languages, the second older Slavic orthographies, and the third non-Slavic languages. Several Cyrillic characters included in ISO 9 are not available as pre-composed characters in Unicode, neither are some of the transliterations; combining diacritical marks have to be used in these cases. Unicode, on the other hand, includes some historic characters that are not dealt with in ISO 9.
The text is the chorus of the hymn of the Russian Federation:
ISO/R 9
ISO Recommendation No. 9, published 1954 and revised 1968, is an older version of the standard, with different transliteration for different Slavic languages, reflecting their phonemic differences. It is closer to the original international system of Slavist scientific transliteration. The languages covered are Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian. ISO 9:1995 is shown for comparison.
Sub-standards
ISO/R 9:1968 permits some deviations from the main standard. In the table below, they are listed in the columns sub-standard 1 and sub-standard 2.
The first sub-standard defines some language-dependent transliterations for Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Bulgarian.
The second sub-standard permits, in countries where tradition favours it, a set of alternative transliterations, but only as a group.
