YIVO Transliteration

The Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (ייִדישער װיסנשאַפֿטלעכער אינסטיטוט), called YIVO for short, is the one of the primary pedagogical institutions of the Yiddish language, and a widely-accepted standards body in the domain of Yiddish-as-a-second-language education. In that capacity, they have provided a guide for how one may write Yiddish words using a Latin alphabet. This guide is provided as a table below.

Bear in mind that YIVO orthographical standards are not necessarily representative of how Yiddish is written (or spoken) in the real world. At the bottom of this page, you will find a table of common deviations from YIVO-recommended orthography. Additionally, Yiddish words derived from Hebrew and Aramaic frequently do not conform to the rules of YIVO transliteration, as they tend to preserve their original spellings from those languages.