| Gaj's Latin alphabet Gajeva latinica /Гајева латиница | |
|---|---|
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| Script type | |
Period | early 19th century – present |
| Languages | |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
Child systems | Slovene alphabet Montenegrin Latin alphabet Macedonian Latin alphabet Bulgarian Latin Alphabet |
Sister systems | Slovak alphabet Latvian alphabet Lithuanian alphabet |
| Unicode | |
| subset ofLatin | |
| This article containsphonetic transcriptions in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. For the distinction between[ ],/ / and ⟨ ⟩, seeIPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
Gaj's Latin alphabet[a][b] is the form of theLatin script used for writing all fourstandard varieties ofSerbo-Croatian:Bosnian,Croatian,Montenegrin, andSerbian. It contains 27 individual letters and 3 digraphs. Each letter (including digraphs) represents oneSerbo-Croatian phoneme, yielding a highlyphonemic orthography. It closely corresponds to theSerbian Cyrillic alphabet.
The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguistLjudevit Gaj during theIllyrian 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.
The alphabet consists of thirtyupper andlower case letters:
| Majuscule forms (also calleduppercase orcapital letters) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A | B | C | Č | Ć | D | Dž | Đ | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | Lj | M | N | Nj | O | P | R | S | Š | T | U | V | Z | Ž |
| Minuscule forms (also calledlowercase orsmall letters) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| a | b | c | č | ć | d | dž | đ | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | lj | m | n | nj | o | p | r | s | š | t | u | v | z | ž |
| Broad IPA Value | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| /a/ | /b/ | /t͡s/ | /t͡ʃ/ | /t͡ɕ/ | /d/ | /d͡ʒ/ | /d͡ʑ/ | /e/ | /f/ | /ɡ/ | /x/ | /i/ | /j/ | /k/ | /l/ | /ʎ/ | /m/ | /n/ | /ɲ/ | /o/ | /p/ | /r/ | /s/ | /ʃ/ | /t/ | /u/ | /ʋ/ | /z/ | /ʒ/ |
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,[1][2] or, in the case of consonants, by being appended byschwa, e.g./fə/.[3][4][5] In mathematics,⟨j⟩ is commonly pronouncedjot,[6] as in theGerman of Germany.[citation needed]
Various foreign letters are utilised in orthographically unadaptedloanwords and foreign proper names, such asQuébec.[7][8][9] Orthographically unadapted spelling of foreign names and some loanwords is standard in Croatia, whereas Serbians prefer to use orthographically adapted spellings. Non-native lettersQ,W,X, andY appear on theSerbo-Croatian keyboard. These four letters are usually named as follows:⟨q⟩ askve orku,⟨w⟩ asduplo ve ordvostruko ve,⟨x⟩ asiks, and⟨y⟩ asipsilon.[7][10][11]
Digraphs⟨dž⟩,⟨lj⟩ and⟨nj⟩ 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 (/d͡ʒêp/, Cyrillicџеп) uses the digraph, whilenadživjeti (/nadʒǐːvjeti/, Cyrillicнадживјети, morphological boundary: prefixnad- + baseživjeti) uses two separate letters.
| U LJ E | M J E NJ A Č N I C A |
The vowelsa,e,i,o,u, along with thesyllabic consonantsr andl, can take one of 5 accents: thedouble grave accent (◌̏) for a short vowel with falling tone, theinverted breve (◌̑) for a long vowel with falling tone, thegrave accent (◌̀) for a short vowel with rising tone, theacute accent (◌́) for long vowel with rising tone, andmacron (◌̄) for a non-tonic long vowel. These diacritic accents are typically used in dictionaries and linguistic publications, and in poetry to denotemetrically correct reading. In ordinary prose they occur when needed to resolve semantic ambiguity betweenhomographs:kod ('at') vs.kȏd ('code'),sam ('am') vs.sȃm ('alone'). For the same reason, the length of an unaccented syllable can be marked with ⟨◌̄⟩ orcircumflex ⟨◌̂⟩, without accentuating the rest of the word. This is typically used to distinguish homographic nominative or genitive singular and genitive plural forms of nouns, where the genitive plural has a long final vowel:knjiga ('book'Nsg.) vs.knjigâ orknjigā ('books'Gpl.),prijatelja ('friend'Gsg.) vs.prijateljâ orprijateljā ('friends'Gpl.).[13][14]
In Croatian writing the Latin alphabet became dominant in the 16th century, marginalising theCyrillic and theGlagolitic alphabets.[15] In the 17th century there coalesced two major orthographic practices for using the Latin alphabet.Dalmatia used a system based on theItalian orthography, whereas the continentalKaykavian writing was based onHungarian. In the 18th century theSlavonian orthography arose as well, a mixture of the previous two.[16] However, the specifics of the alphabetic systems tended to vary from writer to writer.[17]
In addition to these three widely used systems, multiple individual writers attempted their own reforms of the alphabet. These includeRajmund Đamanjić (1639), the early 1700s Dubrovnik academy work led byĐuro Matijašević andIgnjat Đurđević, as well as the early 1700sLexicon Latino-Illyricum byPavao Ritter Vitezović.
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The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguistLjudevit Gaj in 1835 during theIllyrian movement inethnically Croatian parts of theAustrian Empire. It was meant to serve as a unified orthography forthree Croat-populated kingdoms within the Austrian Empire at the time, namelyCroatia,Dalmatia andSlavonia, and their three dialect groups,Kajkavian,Chakavian andShtokavian, which historically utilized different spelling rules.
It was largely based onJan Hus'sCzech alphabet, (č, ž, š) andPolish (ć). Gaj invented⟨lj⟩,⟨nj⟩ and⟨dž⟩, according to similar solutions inHungarian (ly, ny and dzs, although dž combinations exist also in Czech (and Polish as dż)). In 1830 inBuda, he published the bookKratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ("Brief basics of the Croatian-Slavonic orthography"), which was the first common Croatianorthography book.
Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and theCzech orthography, making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. FollowingVuk Karadžić's reform of Cyrillic in the early nineteenth century, in the 1830s Ljudevit Gaj did the same forlatinica, using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correlation between the Cyrillic and Latin orthographies, resulting in a parallel system.[18]
In 1878Đuro Daničić proposed a replacement of the digraphs⟨dž⟩,⟨dj⟩,[c]⟨lj⟩ and⟨nj⟩ with single letters:⟨ģ⟩,⟨đ⟩,⟨ļ⟩ and⟨ń⟩ respectively.[21] Of the four,⟨đ⟩ was accepted inIvan Broz's 1892Hrvatski pravopis ("Croatian Orthography") and it thus became a part of the standard alphabet, though it was not immediately accepted by all writers and publishers.[22][20] The other three letters remained in use only in certain philological publications.[19][20] Names of individual people have sometimes retained the pre-đ spelling:Ksaver Šandor Gjalski (/d͡ʑâːlskiː/),[23]Gjuro Szabo (/d͡ʑǔːro/).[24][25]
Serbo-Croatian was regarded as a single language since the 1850Vienna Literary Agreement, to be written in two forms: one (Serb) in the adapted Serbian Cyrillic alphabet,ćirilica; the other (Croat) in the adapted Croatian Latin alphabet,[26] that is to say Gaj's Latin alphabet,latinica.
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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 writersLjubomir Stojanović andJovan Skerlić, it became part of the school curriculum after 1914.[27]
During World War I,Austria-Hungary banned the Cyrillic alphabet inBosnia[28] and its use in occupied Serbia was banned in schools.[29] Cyrillic was banned in theIndependent State of Croatia in World War II.[30]
The government ofSFR Yugoslavia made some initial effort to promote romanization, use of the Latin alphabet even in theOrthodox Serbian andMontenegrin parts of Yugoslavia, but met with resistance.[31] The use oflatinica did however become more common among Serbian speakers, and the Serbian language became an example ofdigraphia.
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.[32]
Following thebreakup of Yugoslavia, Gaj's Latin alphabet remained in use inBosnian andCroatian standards ofSerbo-Croatian. Another standard of Serbo-Croatian,Montenegrin, uses a slightly modified version of it, theMontenegrin Latin alphabet.
In 1993, the authorities ofRepublika Srpska underRadovan Karadžić andMomčilo Krajišnik decided to proclaimEkavian andSerbian Cyrillic to be official in Republika Srpska, which was opposed both by nativeBosnian Serb writers at the time and the general public, and that decision was rescinded in 1994.[33] Nevertheless, it was reinstated in a milder form in 1996, and today still the use of Serbian Latin is officially discouraged inRepublika Srpska, in favor of Cyrillic.[34]
Article 10 of theConstitution of Serbia[35] adopted by a referendum in 2006 defined Cyrillic as the official script inSerbia, 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.[36]
Today, Serbian is more likely to be written in Latin inMontenegro than in Serbia.[37] Exceptions to this include Serbian websites where use of Latin alphabet is often more convenient, and increasing use in tabloid and popular media such asBlic,Danas andSvet.[38] More established media, such as the formerly state-runPolitika, andRadio Television of Serbia,[39] or foreignGoogle News,[40]Voice of Russia[41] andFacebook tend to use Cyrillic script.[42] Some websites offer the content in both scripts, using Cyrillic as the source and auto generating Romanized version.
In 2013 in Croatia there weremassive protests against official Cyrillic signs on local government buildings inVukovar.[43]
Each Cyrillic and Latin Serbo-Croatian letter has its exact counterpart in the other alphabet, although Latin digraphs⟨lj⟩,⟨nj⟩ and⟨dž⟩ correspond to Cyrillic single letters⟨љ⟩,⟨њ⟩ and⟨џ⟩, so knowledge of Serbian is sometimes required to do proper transliteration from Latin back to Cyrillic.
The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of Gaj's Latin alphabet, along with the equivalent forms in the Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic alphabet.
| Cyrillic | А а | Б б | В в | Г г | Д д | Ђ ђ | Е е | Ж ж | З з | И и | Ј ј | К к | Л л | Љ љ | М м |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latin | A a | B b | V v | G g | D d | Đ đ | E e | Ž ž | Z z | I i | J j | K k | L l | Lj lj | M m |
| Cyrillic | Н н | Њ њ | О о | П п | Р р | С с | Т т | Ћ ћ | У у | Ф ф | Х х | Ц ц | Ч ч | Џ џ | Ш ш |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latin | N n | Nj nj | O o | P p | R r | S s | T t | Ć ć | U u | F f | H h | C c | Č č | Dž dž | Š š |
Serbian personal and place names are consistently mapped betweenćirilica andlatinica. A problem is presented by the letterĐ/đ that represents theaffricate[dʑ] (the same sound written as⟨j⟩ in most romanizations ofJapanese, similar, though not identical to English⟨j⟩ as in "jewel"), which is still sometimes represented by⟨dj⟩. Atranscribed "Dj" is still sometimes encountered in rendering Serbian names into English (e.g.Novak Djokovic), though strictly Đ should be used (as in Croatian). Conversely, in Serbian, foreign names are phoneticallytransliterated into both Latin and Cyrillic. For example, in Serbian,George Washington becomesDžordž Vašington orЏорџ Вашингтон.[44] An exception to this are place names which are so well known as to have their own form (exonym): just as English hasVienna,Austria (and notGermanWien,Österreich) so Croatian and Serbian haveBeč, Austrija (Serbian Cyrillic:Беч, Аустрија).
In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the propercharacter encoding to use to write text in Latin Croatian on computers.
The preferredcharacter encoding for Croatian today is either theISO 8859-2, or theUnicode encodingUTF-8 (with two bytes or 16 bits necessary to use the letters with diacritics). However, as of 2010[update], one can still find programs as well as databases that useCP1250, CP852 or even CROSCII.
Digraphs⟨dž⟩,⟨lj⟩ and⟨nj⟩ in their upper case, title case and lower case forms have dedicated Unicode code points as shown in the table below, However, these are included chiefly for backwardscompatibility with legacy encodings which kept a one-to-one correspondence with Cyrillic; modern texts use a sequence of characters.
| Character sequence | Composite character | Unicode code point |
|---|---|---|
| DŽ | DŽ | U+01C4 |
| Dž | Dž | U+01C5 |
| dž | dž | U+01C6 |
| LJ | LJ | U+01C7 |
| Lj | Lj | U+01C8 |
| lj | lj | U+01C9 |
| NJ | NJ | U+01CA |
| Nj | Nj | U+01CB |
| nj | nj | U+01CC |
It's possible to also use theEnglish alphabet, by dropping diacritics. This is sometimes known as "ASCII Serbian". It is commonly used in SMS messages, comments on the Internet or e-mails, mainly when users do not have a Serbian keyboard installed. In its ASCII form, the number of used letters drops down to 22, as the letters "q", "w", "x" and "y" are not used. This leads to some ambiguity due tohomographs, however, context is usually sufficient to clarify these issues.
Using such an incompletelatinica does not allow for easy transliteration back to Cyrillic without significant manual work. Google tried using a machine learning approach to solving this problem and developed an interactive text input tool that enables typing Serbian in ASCII and auto-converting to Cyrillic.[46] However, manual typing is still required with occasional disambiguation selection from the pop-up menu.
Serbian text can be converted from Cyrillic to Latin and vice versa automatically by computer. There are add-in tools available forMicrosoft Word[47] andOpenOffice.org,[48] as well as command line tools for Linux, MacOS and Windows.
Since the early 1840s, Gaj's alphabet was increasingly used forSlovene. In the beginning, it was most commonly used by Slovene authors who treated Slovene as a variant of Serbo-Croatian (such asStanko Vraz), but it was later accepted by a large spectrum of Slovene-writing authors. The breakthrough came in 1845, when the Slovene conservative leaderJanez Bleiweis started using Gaj's script in his journalKmetijske in rokodelske novice ("Agricultural and Artisan News"), which was read by a wide public in the countryside. By 1850, Gaj's alphabet (known asgajica in Slovene) became the only officialSlovene alphabet, replacing three other writing systems that had circulated in theSlovene Lands since the 1830s: the traditionalbohoričica, named afterAdam Bohorič, who codified it; thedajnčica, named afterPeter Dajnko; and themetelčica, named afterFranc Serafin Metelko.
The Slovene version of Gaj's alphabet differs from the Serbo-Croatian one in several ways:
As in Serbo-Croatian, Slovene orthography does not make use of diacritics to mark accent in words in regular writing, butheadwords in dictionaries are given with them to account forhomographs. For instance, letter⟨e⟩ can be pronounced in four ways (/eː/,/ɛ/,/ɛː/ and/ə/), and letter⟨v⟩ in two ([ʋ] and[w], though the difference is notphonemic). Also, it does not reflect consonant voicing assimilation: compare e.g. Slovene⟨odpad⟩ and Serbo-Croatian⟨otpad⟩ ('junkyard', 'waste').
Romanization ofMacedonian is done according to Gaj's Latin alphabet[49][50] with slight modification. Gaj'sć andđ are not used at all, withḱ andǵ introduced instead. The rest of the letters of the alphabet are used to represent the equivalent Cyrillic letters. Also, Macedonian uses the letterdz, which is not part of the Serbo-Croatian phonemic inventory. As per the orthography, bothlj andĺ are accepted as romanisations of љ and bothnj andń for њ. For informal purposes, like texting, most Macedonian speakers will omit the diacritics or use a digraph- and trigraph-based system for ease as there is no Macedonian Latin keyboard supported on most systems. For example,š becomessh ors, anddž becomesdzh ordz.
This alphabet influencedalphabets of Romani languages that are spoken inSoutheast Europe, namelyVlax andBalkan Romani.
The standard Gaj's Latin alphabetkeyboard layout for personal computers is as follows:
Several polls have been conducted regarding the preferred writing script in Serbia. Polls ask respondents to identify the script they tend to use more.
Latin is predominant in online spaces, while official documentation favours the Cyrillic script. North and west of Serbia tend to use Latin more than South and East. Younger people are more likely to use Latin, while older people are more likely to use Cyrillic. People in urban areas are more likely to use Latin, whilst people in rural areas are more likely to use Cyrillic.[51]
| Year | Pollster | Result | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cyrilic | Latin | Both | ||
| 2002[51] | 21.9% | 39.8% | 38.3% | |
| 2011[51] | 35% | 35% | 25% | |
| 2014[52] | Politika | 36.2% | 47.3% | 16% |
| 2018[51] | 63% | 18% | 18% | |
| South Slavic languages and dialects | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Western South Slavic
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Transitional dialects
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Prebrojavamo sve uređene četvorke a-jedan, a-dva, a-tri, a-četiri, pri čemu ovi a-jot idu po skupu dečki.[We're counting all ordered quadruples a-one, a-two, a-three, a-four, where these a-jay go over the set of boys.]
Following Vuk's reform of Cyrillic (see above) in the early nineteenth century, Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s performed the same operation on Latinica, using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one symbol correlation between Cyrillic and Latinica as applied to the Serbian and Croatian parallel system.
