Cyrillization of German

Latin-script German words are transcribed into Cyrillic-script languages according to rules based on pronunciation. Because German orthography is largely phonemic, transcription into Cyrillic follows relatively simple rules.

Russian and Bulgarian
The standard rules for orthographic transcription into Russian were developed by Rudzhero S. Giliarevski (ru) and Boris A. Starostin (ru) in 1969 for various languages; they have been revised by later scholars including D. I. Ermolovich (ru) and I. S. Alexeyeva (ru). The established spellings of a few names which were already common before this time sometimes deviates from these rules; for example, the Ludwig is traditionally Людвиг (including in placenames), with ю instead of у. It was also historically common to render personal names into their Russian forms or cognates, rather than strictly transliterating them, as with Peter being rendered as Пётр. German phonemes which do not exist in Russian are rendered by their closest approximations: the umlauts ö and ü are rendered as ё (yo) and ю (yu), and ä and e are mostly rendered as е (not э). H (when not part of a cluster) is now rendered with х or omitted (when silent); it was historically often rendered with г (g), as in the name of Heinrich Heine (Генрих Гейне). The Cyrillic letters ы and щ are not used.