Zje (З́ з́; italics: ''З́ з́'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

, formed from З with the addition of an

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...

. It is used in the

Montenegrin alphabet The Montenegrin alphabet is the collective name given to "" ( Montenegrin Latin alphabet; in Cyrillic) and "" ( Montenegrin Cyrillic alphabet; in Latin), the writing systems used to write the Montenegrin language. It was adopted on 9 June 2009 b ...

. It represents the

voiced alveolo-palatal fricative The voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ("z", plus the curl also found in its voiceless counterp ...

/ʑ/. It corresponds to the

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

Ź.

Origins

One of the first observations of the sound /ʑ/ in Montenegrin, was made by Vuk Karadžić in 1818, in his article "Srpski rječnik istolkovan njemačkim i latinskim riječima" in which he notes that Herzegovians (a cultural region which stretches over Montenegro, thus presumably he also referred to Montenegrins considering he notes words such as iźeo, which are present in Montenegro but not in Herzegovina): ''"Ercegovci, kašto izgovaraju s pred j kao Poljsko ś, a z kao ź, n. p. sjekira, sjutra, izjeo..."'' First instance of usage of the accented Cyrillic letter з́ was in 1926. by Danilo Vušović. It came into official use in mid-2009, with the adoption of the

Law on the Official Language Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a science and as the ar ...

in Montenegro. The letter originates from

rural areas In general, a rural area or a countryside is a geographic area that is located outside towns and cities. Typical rural areas have a low population density and small settlements. Agricultural areas and areas with forestry are typically descri ...

in Montenegro.

Computing codes

Being a relatively recent letter, not present in any legacy 8-bit Cyrillic encoding, the letter З́ is not represented directly by a

precomposed character A precomposed character (alternatively composite character or decomposable character) is a Unicode entity that can also be defined as a sequence of one or more other characters. A precomposed character may typically represent a letter with a diac ...

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

either; it has to be composed as З+ (U+0301).

References

Cyrillic letters Montenegrin language {{Cyrillic-alphabet-stub

Origins

Computing codes

See also

References