The symbol originates with the 15th-century
Czech alphabet that was introduced by the reforms of
Jan Hus. From there, it was first adopted into the
Croatian alphabet by
Ljudevit Gaj in 1830 to represent the same sound, and from there on into other orthographies, such as
Latvian,
Lithuanian,
Slovak,
Slovene,
Karelian,
Sami,
Veps and
Sorbian. Some orthographies such as
Bulgarian Cyrillic,
Macedonian Cyrillic, and
Serbian Cyrillic use the "
ш" letter, which represents the sound that "š" would represent in Latin-script alphabets. Moreover,
Bosnian,
Croatian, and
Montenegrin standard languages adopted Gaj's Croatian alphabet alongside Cyrillic thereby adopting "š", while the same alphabet is used for
Romanization of Macedonian. Certain variants of
Belarusian Latin and
Bulgarian Latin also use the letter. In
Finnish and
Estonian,
š occurs only in loanwords.
Polish and
Hungarian do not use
š. Polish uses the digraph
sz. Hungarian uses the basic Latin letter
s and uses the digraph
sz as equivalent to most other languages that use
s. Outside
Europe,
Syriac Latin adopted the letter but it, alongside other letters with diacritics, is rarely used. The alphabet is not used natively to write the language for which the
Syriac alphabet is used instead. The letter is also used in
Lakota,
Cheyenne,
Myaamia and
Cree (in dialects such as
Moose Cree),
Classical Malay (until end of 19th century) and some African languages such as
Northern Sotho and
Songhay. It is used in the
Persian Latin (Rumi) alphabet, equivalent to
ش. ==Transliteration==