Serbian Cyrillic Alphabet
| Serbian Cyrillic |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | |
| Languages | Serbo-Croatian |
|
Time period
|
1814 (modern) |
|
Parent systems
|
|
|
Child systems
|
Macedonian |
| Direction | Left-to-right |
| ISO 15924 | Cyrl, 220 |
|
Unicode alias
|
Cyrillic |
| subset of Cyrillic (U+0400...U+04F0) | |
The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (Serbian: српска ћирилица/srpska ćirilica, pronounced [sr̩̂pskaː t͡ɕirǐlit͡sa]) is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script for the Serbian language, developed in 1818 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write standard modern Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, the other being Latin.
Karadžić based his alphabet on the previous "Slavonic-Serbian" script, following the principle of "write as you speak and read as it is written", removing obsolete letters and letters representing iotified vowels, introducing ⟨J⟩ from the Latin alphabet instead, and adding several consonant letters for sounds specific to Serbian phonology. During the same period, Croatian linguists led by Ljudevit Gaj adapted the Latin alphabet, in use in western South Slavic areas, using the same principles. As a result of this joint effort, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets for Serbo-Croatian have a complete one-to-one congruence, with the Latin digraphs Lj, Nj, and Dž counting as single letters.
Vuk's Cyrillic alphabet was officially adopted in Serbia in 1868, and was in exclusive use in the country up to the inter-war period. Both alphabets were co-official in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and later in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Due to the shared cultural area, Gaj's Latin alphabet saw a gradual adoption in Serbia since, and both scripts are used to write modern standard Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian; Croatian only uses the Latin alphabet. In Serbia, Cyrillic is seen as being more traditional, and has the official status (designated in the Constitution as the "official script", compared to Latin's status of "script in official use" designated by a lower-level act). It is also an official script in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, along with Latin.
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