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Transcription & orthography toolset

This toolset is a loose conglomeration of applications aiming to help you handle various character encodings, orthographies, transcriptions and transliterations you might encounter when working with Uralic languages and other languages of Europe and Northern Asia that use variants of the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet.


User manual and documentation

The user manual and documentation gives a detailed overview of the functionality of the individual tools published here, and gives the sources used to create models for individual languages. It also includes an overview map of the Cyrillic keyboard layout. If you wish to contribute to this toolset and want to help us create resources for additional languages, you will find instructions on the information we need to expand this toolset in the manual.


Open manual

Keyboard layouts

This keyboard layout should cover all Cyrillic orthographies currently in official usage, and a number of archaic ones. It is based on Latin QWERTY-layouts, i.e. the Cyrillic letter “р” /r/ is placed where the letter “r” is placed on QWERTY-layouts used for the Latin alphabet. As there is no 1:1 relationship between letters of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet, these correspondences are not always perfect. Punctuation marks are arranged as they are on the Finnish/Swedish and Estonian keyboard layouts.


Cyrillic Keyboard Layout (Windows) Installation instructions

Universal diactric helper

The Universal diacritic helper lets you add diacritic markings to Cyrillic and Latin characters, and lets you create non-standard variants of letters. Using this tool, you can create texts in a wide number of orthographies, even if you only have access to a “basic” Latin or Cyrillic keyboard layout. The application uses so-called modifiers, which users should place in square brackets after letters they intend to modify. For example, [a] adds an accent to a letter, [m] a macron: y[a] → ý, a[m] → ā


Go to universal diactritic helper

Transcription and transliteration

These tools transcribe and transliterate from a wide range of writing systems used for the respective language: standard modern Cyrillic orthography, standard modern Latin orthography (if it exists), UPA/Finno-Ugric Transcription, IPA, ISO 9, archaic orthographies. It is currently available for Mari (also Hill Mari), Udmurt, Komi (also Komi-Permyak), Erzya, Moksha, (Northern) Mansi, Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, and Russian.


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Language-specific diacritic helpers

This rudimentary tool is available for almost a hundred languages. It gives users an overview of what non-standard (Latin or Cyrillic) characters are in use in the language’s modern literary language, and provides users with a list of shortcuts they can use to access the special characters used in the language at hand. For example, for Turkish, the following transformations are carried out: c: → ç, g: → ğ, i: → ı, o: → ö, s: → ş, u: → ü, a- → â, i- → î, u- → û.

The tool is currently available for the following languages:

Latin-based orthographies

 Albanian, Azeri, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Crimean Tatar, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Fuyu Kyrgyz, Gagauz, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inari Saami, Ingrian, Irish, Italian, Karelian, Kven, Latvian, Lithuanian, Livonian, Lule Saami, Maltese, Manx, North Saami, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Scottish Gaelic, Skolt Saami, Slovak, Slovene, Sorbian, South Saami, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Turkmen, Veps, Võru, Welsh

Cyrillic-based orthographies

Abaza, Abkhaz, Adyghe, Aghul, Altai, Avar, Azeri, Belarusian, Buryat, Chechen, Chukchi, Dargwa, Dolgan, Dungan, Enets, Even, Evenki, Ingush, Itelmen, Kabardian, Kalmyk, Karachay-Balkar, Kazakh, Ket, Khakas, Khanty, Kildin Saami, Kyrgyz, Lak, Lezgian, Macedonian, Mansi, Mongolian, Nenets, Nganasan, Ossetian, Rutul, Sakha, Selkup, Serbian, Shor, Tabasaran, Tajik, Tat, Tofa, Tsakhur, Tuvan, Ukrainian, Yukaghir


Go to diacritic helpers

Source code

The source code for these tools is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This means it can be used and reproduced free of charge for non-profit purposes, contingent on attribution.


Download source code

Contact Us

Project Coordination
Prof. Dr. Rogier Blokland

Uppsala University
Department of Modern Languages
Engelska parken
Thunbergsv. 3 L
751 26 Uppsala
Sweden

Organizational Assistant
Dr. phil. Maximilian Murmann (LMU Munich)

Technical Administration
Dr. tech. Dr. phil. Jeremy Bradley (University of Vienna)

Webmaster
Tobias Weber, M.A. (LMU Munich)

The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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