Serbo-Croatian Alphabet

Serbo-Croatian is a pluricentric South Slavic language spoken in the Balkans. It forms the basis for four mutually intelligible standard varieties:

• Serbian — official in Serbia; uses both Cyrillic and Latin scripts

• Croatian — official in Croatia and EU; uses only the Latin script

• Bosnian — official in Bosnia and Herzegovina; uses the Latin script

• Montenegrin — official in Montenegro; uses both Cyrillic and Latin

All four varieties share the same 30-letter Gajica Latin alphabet as their common writing system.

The Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet (Gajica) has 30 letters: 5 vowels and 25 consonants. Three of those consonants — Lj, Nj, and Dž — are digraphs (two-letter combinations) that are counted as single letters and appear as such in dictionaries.

The Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet was created by Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872), a Croatian linguist and cultural leader, in the 1830s. He adapted the Czech diacritical system, adding haček marks (ˇ) for palatalized sounds.

The phonemic principles were developed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864), who reformed the Serbian literary language following the principle: "Write as you speak, read as it is written."

The resulting alphabet is sometimes called Gajica (for the Latin script) and Vukica (for the Cyrillic script).

Serbo-Croatian has several learner-friendly features:

• Phonemic orthography — every letter always sounds the same

• No silent letters — every written letter is pronounced

• Latin-based script familiar to most Western learners

The challenges include: mastering grammatical cases (7 cases), distinguishing Č/Ć and Dž/Đ, and learning the pitch accent system used in standard speech.

In terms of the Latin alphabet, Serbian and Croatian use the same 30 letters in exactly the same order. There is no difference between the Latin alphabets used for Serbian (Gajica) and Croatian.

The differences lie in:

• Script usage — Serbian also uses Cyrillic; Croatian uses only Latin

• Vocabulary — some words differ between national standards

• Pronunciation — some regional dialect features differ

For Latin alphabet purposes, both are identical 30-letter systems.

"Digraphic" means the language uses two different writing systems:

• The Latin script (Gajica) — used predominantly in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and widely in modern Serbia and Montenegro

• The Cyrillic script (Vukica) — the official script in Serbia; also taught in Montenegro and used in the Bosnian Serb entity

The Latin and Cyrillic scripts for Serbo-Croatian have a perfect one-to-one correspondence, so knowing one makes it easy to learn the other.