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Gaj's Latin alphabet


Gaj's Latin alphabet (Serbo-Croatian: abeceda, latinica, or gajica) is the form of the Latin script used for Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin). It was devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1835, based on Jan Hus's Czech alphabet. A slightly reduced version is used as the script of the Slovene language, and a modified version is used for romanization of the Macedonian language. Pavao Ritter Vitezović had proposed an idea for the orthography of the Croatian language, stating that every sound should have only one letter.

Today Gaj's alphabet is used in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia.

The alphabet consists of thirty upper and lower case letters:

Gaj's original alphabet contained the digraph ⟨dj⟩, which Serbian linguist Đuro Daničić later replaced by the letter ⟨đ⟩.

The letters do not have names, and consonants are normally pronounced as such when spelling is necessary (or followed by a short schwa, e.g. /fə/). When clarity is needed, they are pronounced similar to the German alphabet: 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. These rules for pronunciation of individual letters are common as far as the 22 letters that match the ISO basic Latin alphabet are concerned. The use of others is mostly limited to the context of linguistics, while in mathematics, ⟨j⟩ is commonly pronounced jot, as in German. The missing four letters are pronounced as follows: ⟨q⟩ as ku or kju, ⟨w⟩ as dublve or duplo ve, ⟨x⟩ as iks, ⟨y⟩ as ipsilon.


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