I think it's actually a political protest. Ukrainian more-or-less shares an alphabet with Russian. A number of former Soviet countries that in the past shared a

I think it's actually a political protest. Ukrainian more-or-less shares an alphabet with Russian. A number of former Soviet countries that in the past shared an alphabet with Russian have been abandoning Cyrillic and moving to the Latin alphabet. This software makes it possible for Ukrainians to transliterate text easily to Latin. I think people might want to do that because they are just so mad at Russia. Of course, the Cyrillic alphabet was not invented for Russia, it was invented for all the Slavic languages. The reason Czech/Slovak/Polish use the Latin alphabet is because they are Catholic countries and the Pope at the time REQUIRED Catholic countries to use the Latin alphabet. This is the reason why Czech/Slovak/Polish are so hard to read to Western Europeans - they use the Latin alphabet in a very idiosyncratic way, with all sorts of di/tri/quadgraphs and diacritic marks to represent sounds that are very simply represented in Cyrillic. I think Ukrainian is too connected with Cyrillic to switch to Latin, especially because of the religious and cultural roots - the Ukrainian orthodox church, like other Slavic orthodox churches, uses the Cyrillic alphabet natively. The Cyrillic alphabet does not belong to Russia. It was invented before Russia even existed. So I doubt Ukrainian will move away from Cyrillic like they are trying in Kazakhstan. But this software package makes it easier to see what it would feel like to move Ukrainian to Latin.