Gaj's Latin alphabet
Gaj's Latin alphabet is the form of the Latin script used for writing all four standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. It contains 27 individual letters and 3 digraphs. Each letter represents one Serbo-Croatian phoneme, yielding a highly phonemic orthography. It closely corresponds to the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet.
The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj during the Illyrian movement. The alphabet's final form was defined in the late 19th century with contributions from other linguists, and it has since been in standard use. It was also the basis for a number of other Latin alphabets and romanizations in southeastern Europe. In Serbia, where Cyrillic is more prestigious, Gaj's Latin is nevertheless very common in media and everyday life.
Letters
The alphabet consists of thirty upper and lower case letters:Letters are referred to by their name: a, be, ce, če, će, de, dže, đe, e, ef, ge, ha, i, je, ka, el, elj, em, en, enj, o, pe, er, es, eš, te, u, ve, ze, že, or, in the case of consonants, by being appended by schwa, e.g.. In mathematics, is commonly pronounced jot, as in the German of Germany.
Foreign letters
Various foreign letters are utilised in orthographically unadapted loanwords and foreign proper names, such as Québec. Orthographically unadapted spelling of foreign names and some loanwords is standard in Croatia, whereas Serbians prefer to use orthographically adapted spellings. Non-native letters Q, W, X, and Y appear on the Serbo-Croatian keyboard. These four letters are usually named as follows: as kve or ku, as duplo ve or dvostruko ve, as iks, and as ipsilon.Digraphs
, and are considered to be single letters, and they signify single phonemes. However, they are distinguished from occurrences of two such letters that signify two distinct phonemes: džep uses the digraph, while nadživjeti uses two separate letters.- In dictionaries, njegov comes after novine, in a separate section after the end of the section; bolje comes after bolnica; nadžak comes after nadživjeti, and so forth.
- If only the initial letter of a word is capitalized, only the first of the two component letters is capitalized: Njemačka, not NJemačka. Uppercase is used only if the entire word was capitalized: NJEMAČKA. In Unicode, the form is referred to as titlecase, as opposed to the uppercase form, representing one of the few cases in which titlecase and uppercase differ.
- In vertical writing,,, are written horizontally, as a unit. For instance, if ulje is written vertically, appears on the second line. In crossword puzzles,,, each occupy a single square. The word mjenjačnica is written vertically with on the fourth line, while and appear separately on the first and second lines, respectively, because contains two letters, not one.
- If words are written with a space between each letter, each digraph is written as a unit. For instance: U LJ E, M J E NJ A Č N I C A.
Accent marks
History
Croatian Latin alphabet before Gaj
In Croatian writing the Latin alphabet became dominant in the 16th century, marginalising the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic alphabets. In the 17th century there coalesced two major orthographic practices for using the Latin alphabet. Dalmatia used a system based on the Italian orthography, whereas the continental Kaykavian writing was based on Hungarian. In the 18th century the Slavonian orthography arose as well, a mixture of the previous two. However, the specifics of the alphabetic systems tended to vary from writer to writer.In addition to these three widely used systems, multiple individual writers attempted their own reforms of the alphabet. These include Rajmund Đamanjić, the early 1700s Dubrovnik academy work led by Đuro Matijašević and Ignjat Đurđević, as well as the early 1700s Lexicon Latino-Illyricum by Pavao Ritter Vitezović.
Gaj's reform and its revisions
The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1835 during the Illyrian movement in ethnically Croatian parts of the Austrian Empire. It was meant to serve as a unified orthography for three Croat-populated kingdoms within the Austrian Empire at the time, namely Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia, and their three dialect groups, Kajkavian, Chakavian and Shtokavian, which historically utilized different spelling rules.It was largely based on Jan Hus's Czech alphabet, and Polish. Gaj invented, and, according to similar solutions in Hungarian. In 1830 in Buda, he published the book Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja, which was the first common Croatian orthography book.
Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and the Czech orthography, making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. Following Vuk Karadžić's reform of Cyrillic in the early nineteenth century, in the 1830s Ljudevit Gaj did the same for latinica, using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correlation between the Cyrillic and Latin orthographies, resulting in a parallel system.
Image: Djura danicic.jpg|thumb|upright|Đuro Daničić added the letter "Đ" instead of "Dj" in Croatian Academy 1882.
In 1878 Đuro Daničić proposed a replacement of the digraphs,, and with single letters:,, and respectively. Of the four, was accepted in Ivan Broz's 1892 Hrvatski pravopis and it thus became a part of the standard alphabet, though it was not immediately accepted by all writers and publishers. The other three letters remained in use only in certain philological publications. Names of individual people have sometimes retained the pre-đ spelling: Ksaver Šandor Gjalski, Gjuro Szabo.
Serbo-Croatian was regarded as a single language since the 1850 Vienna Literary Agreement, to be written in two forms: one in the adapted Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, ćirilica; the other in the adapted Croatian Latin alphabet, that is to say Gaj's Latin alphabet, latinica.
Introduction in Serbian
The Latin alphabet was not initially taught in schools in Serbia when it became independent in the 19th century. After a series of efforts by Serbian writers Ljubomir Stojanović and Jovan Skerlić, it became part of the school curriculum after 1914.During World War I, Austria-Hungary banned the Cyrillic alphabet in Bosnia and its use in occupied Serbia was banned in schools. Cyrillic was banned in the Independent State of Croatia in World War II.
The government of SFR Yugoslavia made some initial effort to promote romanization, use of the Latin alphabet even in the Orthodox Serbian and Montenegrin parts of Yugoslavia, but met with resistance. The use of latinica did however become more common among Serbian speakers, and the Serbian language became an example of digraphia.
Modern history
In late 1980s, a number of articles had been published in Serbia about a danger of Cyrillic being fully replaced by Latin, thereby endangering what was deemed a Serbian national symbol.Following the breakup of Yugoslavia, Gaj's Latin alphabet remained in use in Bosnian and Croatian standards of Serbo-Croatian. Another standard of Serbo-Croatian, Montenegrin, uses a slightly modified version of it, the Montenegrin Latin alphabet.
In 1993, the authorities of Republika Srpska under Radovan Karadžić and Momčilo Krajišnik decided to proclaim Ekavian and Serbian Cyrillic to be official in Republika Srpska, which was opposed both by native Bosnian Serb writers at the time and the general public, and that decision was rescinded in 1994. Nevertheless, it was reinstated in a milder form in 1996, and today still the use of Serbian Latin is officially discouraged in Republika Srpska, in favor of Cyrillic.
File: Beograd in 25.jpg|thumb|A road sign in Serbia using Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The towns are Šid, Novi Sad and Belgrade.
Article 10 of the Constitution of Serbia adopted by a referendum in 2006 defined Cyrillic as the official script in Serbia, while Latin was given the status of "Script in official use".
A survey from 2014 showed that 47% of the Serbian population favors the Latin alphabet whereas 36% favors Cyrillic; the remaining 17% has no preference.
Today, Serbian is more likely to be written in Latin in Montenegro than in Serbia. Exceptions to this include Serbian websites where use of Latin alphabet is often more convenient, and increasing use in tabloid and popular media such as Blic, Danas and Svet. More established media, such as the formerly state-run Politika, and Radio Television of Serbia, or foreign Google News, Voice of Russia and Facebook tend to use Cyrillic script. Some websites offer the content in both scripts, using Cyrillic as the source and auto generating Romanized version.
In 2013 in Croatia there were massive protests against official Cyrillic signs on local government buildings in Vukovar.