The 2019 Orthography Became a “State Language Standard” Seven Years Later

The Ukrainian word for “project” or “proposal” is now written проєкт. This is because the Ukrainian orthography (правопис), reformed in 2019, established that the [je] sound within loanwords is written with є. Before that, the spelling проект was widely used.

This 2019 orthography was once ruled “invalid” in court, then overturned on appeal and by the Supreme Court. Then, in March 2026, it came into force again — not as a Cabinet resolution, but as a “state language standard” under the State Language Law. The content of the rules has barely changed. What changed is where the authority to set the orthography lies. The following is a summary as of September 2026, based on the text of the orthography, the resolutions of the Cabinet and the Verkhovna Rada, and court records.

What the Orthography Decides

According to the preface of the 2019 edition, the orthography consists of three parts: the alphabet (which letters represent which sounds), spelling (how letters are combined to write the sounds of words), and punctuation (which marks show breaks between ideas). An index at the back lets you look up which rule applies to a given word.

1928, 1933, 1990

The preface also gives the history of Ukrainian orthography. In 1919, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences approved the “Main Rules of Ukrainian Orthography,” and on September 6, 1928, an orthography that had gone through the All-Ukrainian Orthography Conference in Kharkiv was approved by Mykola Skrypnyk, People’s Commissar of Education of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. It is informally called the “Kharkiv Orthography.”

A few years later, however, when the policy of “Ukrainization” was cut short, many of these rules were rescinded as “nationalist” and as separating Ukrainian from “its great brother, Russian” (per the preface’s quotation). A different orthography, approved in 1933, was used, with minor revisions, until 1989; the letter ґ was “arbitrarily” removed from the alphabet. In the edition approved in 1989 and published in 1990, ґ was restored. The letter ґ, and the differences between the Ukrainian and Russian alphabets, are covered in our article on where Ukrainian and Russian differ.

According to the preface, the Kharkiv Orthography continued to be used in the western Ukrainian regions that lay outside Soviet Ukraine, and among many Ukrainians abroad.

What Changed in 2019

The new edition was drafted between 2015 and 2018 by the Ukrainian National Orthography Commission, made up of specialists from the linguistics institutes of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and from universities, and, after public discussion, was approved on October 24, 2018 at a joint meeting of the Academy of Sciences’ Presidium and the Ministry of Education and Science. By Resolution No. 437 of May 22, 2019, the Cabinet of Ministers agreed to this new edition and repealed the relevant items of the 1992 Resolution No. 309. The resolution took effect on May 30, 2019.

The preface states that the new edition revived “some features of the 1928 orthography,” while also noting that the spellings of the late 20th and early 21st centuries had already become part of the tradition of Ukrainian orthography. For this reason, many of the changes took the form of allowing both the old and new spellings. The main ones are as follows.

A rule in the table that “allows both” means that either spelling is correct — the new spelling did not become the only correct one.

Ruled “Invalid” in Court, Then Overturned

The 2019 resolution was challenged in court almost immediately. According to the Supreme Court’s ruling, an individual filed suit in June 2019, and a civic organization in September, both with the Kyiv District Administrative Court, seeking to have Resolution No. 437 annulled; the two suits were combined under case number 640/9824/19.

For roughly three and a half months between the first-instance ruling and the appellate ruling, whether the 2019 orthography could still be used as it stood remained disputed. After the appellate ruling, a Deputy Minister of Justice stated that “the norms of the 2019 orthography are valid and will remain valid” (Ukrinform, May 11, 2021).

2026: Becoming a “State Language Standard”

What was disputed in court was whether the orthography could be handled by a Cabinet resolution. A different answer to this came from the 2019 State Language Law. Article 44 of the State Language Law provides that the National Commission on State Language Standards (Національна комісія зі стандартів державної мови) sets “state language standards” covering the orthography and its changes, terminology, and rules of transcription and transliteration, among others. The mechanism of the State Language Law is introduced in our article on Ukraine’s State Language Law and its staged rollout — customer service after a year and a half, local newspapers after five years.

• January 15, 2026: The Verkhovna Rada, in Resolution No. 4764-IX, “On Strengthening the Role of the Ukrainian Language in Establishing the Ukrainian State,” recommended that the Commission set the orthography as a state language standard by March 1, 2026
• March 1, 2026: The Commission, by Decision No. 47, approved the Ukrainian orthography as a state language standard. The text was finalized by a working group the Commission had set up on April 3, 2025, together with researchers from the Academy of Sciences’ institutes and from universities
• March 27, 2026: The Cabinet, by Resolution No. 398, repealed the 2019 Resolution No. 437
• March 28, 2026: The state language standard “Ukrainian Orthography” took effect

According to the Ministry of Culture and the Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, the 2026 standard does not change the rules of the 2019 edition. What was revised was the organization of the document as a normative text, corrections of typographical errors and duplications, additional examples, corrections to the stress marks of some words, and clarification of the wording of certain provisions. In addition, names connected with “the aggressor state and its allies” were removed from the examples, and a subsection on “the Ukrainian alphabet” was added. The Ministry of Culture states that these changes do not affect the orthography’s rules as far as users are concerned.

The Commission states that it will continue to improve the orthography in order to systematically resolve points that remain under discussion (per an announcement from the same Verkhovna Rada committee). It is possible that one or another of the “allows both” rules listed in the table above will eventually be narrowed to a single form.

When Transliterating Ukrainian into Japanese

The Ukrainian spelling sometimes appears as проект and sometimes as проєкт, which can reflect whether a source predates or postdates 2019. However, the old spelling remains in official documents even after 2019 — for example, Cabinet Order No. 657-r, issued July 28, 2023, uses the old spelling “проекту правопису” (“draft orthography”) in its text. Likewise, for words where both forms are correct, such as ефір and етер, the difference simply reflects which the writer chose. Rather than assuming either form is wrong, the surest approach is to check the orthography’s index to see which rule applies to that word.

How the 1876 Ems Ukaz forced Ukrainian-language publications to be printed in the Russian alphabet is covered in our article on the year after Ukrainian-language publishing was banned in the Russian Empire, when the University of Tokyo was founded in Japan. The history of the orthography is also a history of reclaiming letters that were banned and forced to change.