Serbian Cyrillic alphabet

The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet ( sr, / , ) 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 varieties of Serbo-Croatian, 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 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, for national minorities). It is also an official script in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, along with Latin.

The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was used as a basis for the Macedonian alphabet with the work of Krste Misirkov and Venko Markovski.

Official use

Cyrillic is in official use in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although Bosnian "officially accept both alphabets", the Latin script is almost always used in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whereas Cyrillic is in everyday use in

Republika Srpska

. The Serbian language in Croatia is officially recognized as a minority language; however, the use of Cyrillic in bilingual signs has sparked protests and vandalism.

Cyrillic is an important symbol of Serbian identity. In Serbia, official documents are printed in Cyrillic only even though, according to a 2014 survey, 47% of the Serbian population write in the Latin alphabet whereas 36% write in Cyrillic.

Modern alphabet

The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, along with the equivalent forms in the Serbian Latin alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) value for each letter:

Early history

Early Cyrillic

According to tradition, Glagolitic was invented by the Byzantine Christian missionaries and brothers

Cyril and Methodius

in the 860s, amid the Christianization of the Slavs. Glagolitic appears to be older, predating the introduction of Christianity, only formalized by Cyril and expanded to cover non-Greek sounds. Cyrillic was created by the orders of Boris I of Bulgaria by Cyril's disciples, perhaps at the Preslav Literary School in the 890s.Cubberley, Paul (1996) "The Slavic Alphabets". in Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. (1996). ''The World's Writing Systems.'' Oxford University Press. .

The earliest form of Cyrillic was the ''ustav'', based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and letters from the

Glagolitic alphabet

for consonants not found in Greek. There was no distinction between capital and lowercase letters. The standard language was based on the Slavic dialect of

Thessaloniki

.

Medieval Serbian Cyrillic

Part of the Serbian literary heritage of the Middle Ages are works such as Miroslav Gospel, Vukan Gospels, St. Sava's Nomocanon, Dušan's Code, Munich Serbian Psalter, and others. The first printed book in Serbian was the ''Cetinje Octoechos'' (1494).

Karadžić's reform

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić fled

Serbia

during the Serbian Revolution in 1813, to Vienna. There he met Jernej Kopitar, a linguist with interest in slavistics. Kopitar and Sava Mrkalj helped Vuk to reform Serbian and its orthography. He finalized the alphabet in 1818 with the ''Serbian Dictionary''.

Karadžić reformed standard Serbian and standardised the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles on the

Johann Christoph Adelung

' model and

Jan Hus

' Czech alphabet. Karadžić's reforms of standard Serbian modernised it and distanced it from Serbian and Russian Church Slavonic, instead bringing it closer to common folk speech, specifically, to the dialect of Eastern Herzegovina which he spoke. Karadžić was, together with

Đuro Daničić

, the main Serbian signatory to the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850 which, encouraged by

Austria

n authorities, laid the foundation for Serbian, various forms of which are used by Serbs in

Serbia

,

Montenegro

,

Bosnia and Herzegovina

and

Croatia

today. Karadžić also translated the

New Testament

into Serbian, which was published in 1868.

He wrote several books; ''Mala prostonarodna slaveno-serbska pesnarica'' and ''Pismenica serbskoga jezika'' in 1814, and two more in 1815 and 1818, all with the alphabet still in progress. In his letters from 1815-1818 he used: Ю, Я, Ы and Ѳ. In his 1815 song book he dropped the Ѣ.

The alphabet was officially adopted in 1868, four years after his death.

From the Old Slavic script Vuk retained these 24 letters:

He added one Latin letter:

And 5 new ones:

He removed:

Modern history

Austria-Hungary

Orders issued on the 3 and 13 October 1914 banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in the

Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia

, limiting it for use in religious instruction. A decree was passed on January 3, 1915, that banned Serbian Cyrillic completely from public use. An imperial order in October 25, 1915, banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, except "within the scope of Serb Orthodox Church authorities".Andrej Mitrović, ''Serbia's great war, 1914-1918'
p.78
79. Purdue University Press, 2007. ,

World War II

In 1941, the Nazi puppet

Independent State of Croatia

banned the use of Cyrillic, having regulated it on 25 April 1941, and in June 1941 began eliminating "

Eastern

" (Serbian) words from Croatian, and shut down Serbian schools.

Yugoslavia

The Serbian Cyrillic script was one of the two official scripts used to write Serbo-Croatian in

Yugoslavia

since its establishment in 1918, the other being Latin script (''latinica'').

Following the

breakup of Yugoslavia

in the 1990s, Serbian Cyrillic is no longer used in Croatia on national level, while in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro it remained an official script.

Contemporary period

Under the

Constitution of Serbia

of 2006, Cyrillic script is the only one in official use.

Special letters

The ligatures and , together with , and were developed specially for the Serbian alphabet.

* Karadžić based the letters and on a design by Sava Mrkalj, combining the letters (L) and (N) with the soft sign (Ь).
* Karadžić based on letter "Gea" in the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet.
* was adopted by Karadžić to represent the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate (IPA: ). The letter was based on, but different in appearance to, the letter Djerv, which is the 12th letter of the

Glagolitic alphabet

; that letter had been used in written Serbian since the 12th century, to represent , and .
*Karadžić adopted a design by Lukijan Mušicki for the letter . It was based on the letter , as adapted by Karadžić.
* was adopted from the

Latin alphabet

.

, and were later adopted for use in the Macedonian alphabet.

Differences from other Cyrillic alphabets

Serbian Cyrillic does not use several letters encountered in other Slavic Cyrillic alphabets. It does not use hard sign () and soft sign (), but the aforementioned soft-sign ligatures instead. It does not have Russian/Belarusian , the semi-vowels or , nor the iotated letters (Russian/Bulgarian ), (Ukrainian ), (), (Russian ) or (), which are instead written as two separate letters: . can also be used as a semi-vowel, in place of . The letter is not used. When necessary, it is transliterated as either or .

Serbian and Macedonian italic and

cursive

forms of lowercase letters , and differ from those used in other Cyrillic alphabets. The regular (upright) shapes are generally standardized among languages and there are no officially recognized variations. That presents a challenge in

Unicode

modeling, as the glyphs differ only in italic versions, and historically non-italic letters have been used in the same code positions. Serbian professional typography uses fonts specially crafted for the language to overcome the problem, but texts printed from common computers contain East Slavic rather than Serbian italic glyphs. Cyrillic fonts from Adobe, Microsoft (Windows Vista and later) and a few other font houses include the Serbian variations (both regular and italic).

If the underlying font and Web technology provides support, the proper glyphs can be obtained by marking the text with appropriate language codes. Thus, in non-italic mode:
* бгдпт, produces бгдпт, same (except for the shape of б) as
* бгдпт, producing бгдпт
whereas:
* бгдпт gives бгдпт, and
* бгдпт produces бгдпт.

Since

Unicode

unifies different glyphs in same characters, font support must be present to display the correct variant. Programs like

Mozilla Firefox

,

LibreOffice

(currently under

Linux

only), and some others provide required OpenType support. Of course, font families like GNU FreeFont, DejaVu, Ubuntu, Microsoft "C*" fonts from Windows Vista and above must be used.

See also

* Gaj's Latin alphabet
* Yugoslav braille
* Yugoslav manual alphabet
* Montenegrin alphabet
* Romanization of Serbian
* Serbian calligraphy

References

Citations

Sources

*
*
*
*
* Sir Duncan Wilson, ''The life and times of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, 1787-1864: literacy, literature and national independence in Serbia'', p. 387. Clarendon Press, 1970
Google Books

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Serbian Cyrillic Alphabet
Cyrillic alphabets
Alphabet
Cyrillic alphabet
1818 introductions
Writing systems introduced in the 19th century