Gaj's Latin alphabet (Serbo-Croatian:Gajeva latinica /Гајева латиница,pronounced[ɡâːjevalatǐnit͡sa]), also known asabeceda (Serbian Cyrillic:абецеда,pronounced[abet͡sěːda]) orgajica (Serbian Cyrillic:гајица,pronounced[ɡǎjit͡sa]), is the form of theLatin script used for writingSerbo-Croatian and all of itsstandard varieties: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.

Gaj's Latin alphabet Gajeva latinica
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	early 19th century – present
Languages	Serbo-Croatian
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic alphabet Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Old Italic scripts Latin alphabet Czech alphabet Gaj's Latin alphabet
Child systems	Slovene alphabet Montenegrin Latin alphabet Macedonian Latin alphabet Bulgarian Latin Alphabet
Sister systems	Slovak alphabet Latvian alphabet Lithuanian alphabet
Unicode
Unicode range	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.

The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguistLjudevit Gaj in 1835 during theIllyrian movement inethnically Croatian parts of theAustrian Empire. It was largely based onJan Hus'sCzech alphabet and 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. The alphabet's final form was defined in the late 19th century.

Aslightly reduced version is used as the alphabet forSlovene, and aslightly expanded version is used for modern standard Montenegrin. A modified version is used for theromanization ofMacedonian. It further influencedalphabets of Romani languages that are spoken inSoutheast Europe, namelyVlax andBalkan Romani.

The alphabet consists of thirtyupper andlower 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,^[1][2] or, in the case of consonants, by being appended byschwa, e.g./fə/.^[3][4][5] In mathematics,⟨j⟩ is commonly pronouncedjot, as in theGerman of Germany.^{[citation needed]}

Various foreign letters are utilised in orthographically unadaptedloanwords and foreign proper names, such asQuébec.^[6][7][8] 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.^[6][9][10]

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 whole word. This is typically used to distinguish homographic nominative singular and genitive plural forms of nouns, where the genitive plural has a long final vowel:knjiga ('book'Nsg.) vs.knjigâ orknjigā ('books'Gpl.).[11]^[12]

Digraphs⟨dž⟩,⟨lj⟩ and⟨nj⟩ are considered to be single letters, and they signify single phonemes. However, they are distinguished from occurences 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.

• In dictionaries,njegov comes afternovine, in a separate⟨nj⟩ section after the end of the⟨n⟩ section;bolje comes afterbolnica;nadžak (digraph⟨dž⟩) comes afternadživjeti (⟨d⟩+⟨ž⟩ sequence), and so forth.
• If only the initial letter of a word is capitalized, only the first of the two component letters is capitalized:Njemačka ('Germany'), notNJemačka. InUnicode, the form⟨Nj⟩ is referred to astitlecase, as opposed to the uppercase form⟨NJ⟩, representing one of the few cases in which titlecase and uppercase differ. Uppercase is used only if the entire word was capitalized:NJEMAČKA.

• In vertical writing (such as on signs),⟨dž⟩,⟨lj⟩,⟨nj⟩ are written horizontally, as a unit. For instance, ifulje ('oil') is written vertically,⟨lj⟩ appears on the second line. Incrossword puzzles,⟨dž⟩,⟨lj⟩,⟨nj⟩ each occupy a single square. The wordmjenjačnica ('bureau de change') is written vertically with⟨nj⟩ on the fourth line, while⟨m⟩ and⟨j⟩ appear separately on the first and second lines, respectively, because⟨mj⟩ contains two letters, not one.
• If words are written with a space between each letter (such as on signs), each digraph is written as a unit. For instance:U LJ E,M J E NJ A Č N I C A.

The Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet was mostly designed byLjudevit Gaj, who modelled it afterCzech (č, ž, š) andPolish (ć), and 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. It was not the first ever Croatian orthography work, as it was preceded by works ofRajmund Đamanjić (1639), the early 1700s Dubrovnik academy work led byĐuro Matijašević andIgnjat Đurđević, as well as the early 1700sLexicon Latino-Illyricum byPavao Ritter Vitezović. Croats had previously used the Latin script, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented. Versions of theHungarian alphabet were most commonly used, but others were too, in an often confused, inconsistent fashion.

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.^[13]

In 1878Đuro Daničić proposed a replacement of the digraphs⟨dž⟩,⟨dj⟩,^[a]⟨lj⟩ and⟨nj⟩ with single letters:⟨ģ⟩,⟨đ⟩,⟨ļ⟩ and⟨ń⟩ respectively.^[16] 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.^[17][15] The other three letters remained in use only in certain philological publications.^[14][15] Names of individual people have sometimes retained the pre-đ spelling:Ksaver Šandor Gjalski (/d͡ʑâːlskiː/),^[18]Gjuro Szabo (/d͡ʑǔːro/).^[19][20]

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⟩. 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.

In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the propercharacter encoding to use to write text in Latin Croatian on computers.

• An attempt was made to apply the 7-bit "YUSCII", later "CROSCII", which included the five letters with diacritics at the expense of five non-letter characters ([, ], {, }, @), but it was ultimately unsuccessful. Because the ASCII character @ sorts before A, this led to jokes calling itžabeceda (žaba=frog,abeceda=alphabet).
• Other short-lived vendor-specific efforts were also undertaken.^[which?]
• The8-bitISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) standard was developed by ISO.
• MS-DOS introduced 8-bit encoding CP852 for Central European languages, disregarding the ISO standard.
• Microsoft Windows spread yet another 8-bit encoding calledCP1250, which had a few letters mapped one-to-one with ISO 8859-2, but also had some mapped elsewhere.
• Apple'sMacintosh Central European encoding does not include the entire Gaj's Latin alphabet. Instead, a separate codepage, calledMacCroatian encoding, is used.
• EBCDIC also has a Latin-2 encoding.^[21]

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.

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:

• The Slovene alphabet does not have the characters⟨ć⟩ and⟨đ⟩; the sounds they represent do not occur in Slovene.
• In Slovene, the digraphs⟨lj⟩ and⟨nj⟩ are treated as two separate letters and represent separate sounds (the wordpolje is pronounced[ˈpóːljɛ] or[pɔˈljéː] in Slovene, as opposed to[pôʎe] in Serbo-Croatian).
• While the phoneme/dʒ/ exists in modern Slovene and is written⟨dž⟩, it is used in only borrowed words and so⟨d⟩ and⟨ž⟩ are considered separate letters, not a digraph.

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^[22][23] 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.

The standard Gaj's Latin alphabetkeyboard layout for personal computers is as follows:

• Glagolitic alphabet
• Yugoslav braille
• Yugoslav manual alphabet
• Romanization of Serbian – describes usage not the alphabet
• Romanization of Montenegrin – describes usage not the alphabet

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• Omniglot