Informal o ad hoc romanizacion de ruso ha estado en uso desde los primeros días de las comunicaciones electrónicas, comenzando por el e-mail y la bulletin board systems.^[1] Su uso se ha desvanecido con los avances en internet en ruso que asegura apoyo estandar de alfabeto cirílico^[1] , but resurfaced with proliferation of instant messaging, SMS and mobile phone messaging in Russia.

Debido a su carácter informal, no existió un estándar bien establecido ni nombre vernáculo. En lostempranos días de e-mail, se uso el termino humoristico "Volapuk encoding" (Russian: кодировка "воляпюк" o "волапюк", kodirovka volapyuk)^[1] . Más recientemente el término "translit" emergió indiscriminadamente para referirse a ambos programas de transliteración cirílica (y otras alfabetos no-románicos) al latín, as well as the result of such transliteration. La palabra se derivó por conveniencia y por truncación detransliteración, y más probablemente su uso se originó en diversos lugares. Un ejemplo de "translit" temporanos es el programa para MS DOS TRANSLIT (R)^[2] by Jan Labanowski, which run from the command prompt to convert a Cyrillic file to a Latin one using a specified transliteration table.

Existen 2 variedades fundamentales de romanización de ruso: transliteraciones y tipo Leetspeak de rendering textos rusos. el útimo es fuertemente saturado con palabras comunes del inglés, que a menudo son más breves que las correspondientes rusas, y a veces se refieren como Runglish o Russlish.

Alfabeto ruso para chat

The Russian Chat Alphabet is a fast-to-type mix of Translit and Volapuk - being Translit mostly, it replaces some 2 or 3 character transliterations with shorter 1 character counterparts from Volapuk. This speeds up typing; however, in some cases characters may be volapuk-encoded, making text appear incorrectly and therefore be harder or impossible to read. In Russia and countries where Russian is used regularly to communicate via mobile phone and chat room, it is used as an alternate and free style of transliteration.

The main reason that transliteration is used with Russian is that in text messages you get more Latin characters for your money: usually 160 Latin characters per charged message versus 60/70 Cyrillic characters. Obviously the onus is on getting one Latin symbol (of which there are 26) for each Cyrillic symbol (of which there are 33 in Russian, and extra symbols in Ukrainian and other Cyrillic-based languages). Only those used for Russian are exemplified here.

(Where variants are given, the first is most common and the last is less common - although trends change quickly and differ from person-to-person.)

• А - a
• Б - b, 6
• В - v
• Г - g, r
• Д - d, g (only in fonts with opentail g)
• Е - e (and ye, je, occasionally in word-initial and post-vowel positions, as well as following ъ or ь)
• Ё - e, yo, jo
• Ж - zh, g, *, j, }I{
• З - z, 3
• И - i, u
• Й - i, y, j
• К - k
• Л - l
• М - m
• Н - n
• О - o
• П - p
• Р - r
• С - s, c
• Т - t, m
• У - u, y
• Ф - f
• Х - h, x, kh
• Ц - c, ts, "U,"
• Ч - ch, 4
• Ш - sh, w, 6, "LLI"
• Щ - sh, "W," , sch, shh, shch, shsh
• Ъ - ' (apostrofe), " (quote marks), [not transliterated]
• Ы - y, i, #
• Ь - ' (apostrophe), [not transliterated] - usually only transcribed with "ль"
• Э - e
• Ю - yu, u, iu, ju,
• Я - ya, R, ia, ja, q, 9

References

1. ↑ ^{a b c} A note of cancellation of automatic volapuk encoding (1997) Plantilla:Ru icon
2. ↑ Translit of early 1990s (Wayback Machine archived version)