History
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 Ľviv (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.
A Latin alphabet for Ukrainian publications was also imposed in Romanian Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dobrudja. It was also used by immigrants from these regions in the United States.
In Ukraine under the Russian Empire, Mykhaylo Drahomanov promoted a purely phonemic Cyrillic alphabet (the Drahomanivka) including the Latin letter j in 1876, replacing the digraphs я, є, ю, ї with ја, је, ју, јі. The Ems Ukaz banning Ukrainian-language publication doomed this reform to obscurity.
In Soviet Ukraine, during the 1927 orthographical conference in Kharkiv, linguists M. Johansen, B. Tkačenko, and M. Nakonečnyj proposed the application of the more "international" Latin script to Ukrainian, but the idea was opposed by Soviet government representatives. Later, Vasyl Simovych was a proponent of the Latin script during the tentative latinization in the USSR.
Read more about this topic: Ukrainian Latin Alphabet
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