Serbian Cyrillic alphabet

Serbian Cyrillic is in official use in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although Bosnia and Herzegovina officially recognizes both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts, In Croatia, the Serbian language is officially recognized as a minority language, and the use of Serbian Cyrillic is legally protected in areas with significant Serbian populations. However, the use of Cyrillic on bilingual signs has provoked protests and acts of vandalism in some communities. Serbian Cyrillic is widely regarded as a key symbol of Serbian national and cultural identity. In Serbia, all official documents are printed in Cyrillic only, even though, according to a 2014 survey, 47% of Serbian citizens reported primarily using the Latin script, while 36% reported using 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. 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/).: Summary tables == History ==

Early Cyrillic , attributed to Saint Cyril and Methodius, 16th century According to tradition, the Glagolitic script was created in the 860s by the Byzantine Christian missionaries Cyril and Methodius, during the period of the Christianization of the Slavs. The Glagolitic alphabet is considered the older of the two Slavic scripts and may have existed in some form before the official adoption of Christianity, though it was formalized and systematized by Cyril to represent Slavic sounds not found in Greek. The Cyrillic script gradually replaced Glagolitic over the following centuries. It was likely developed by the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, possibly at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire toward the end of the 9th century. , 18th century The earliest form of the Cyrillic script was known as ustav, a monumental script based on Greek uncial writing. It incorporated ligatures and additional letters adapted from the Glagolitic script to represent sounds not present in Greek. At this stage, there was no distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters. The literary language used was based on the Slavic dialect spoken in the region of Thessaloniki. The reformed Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was officially adopted in 1868, four years after his death. From the Old Church Slavonic script, Vuk Karadžić retained the following 24 letters: He adopted one letter from the Latin alphabet: He also created five new letters to represent specific Serbian phonemes: The following archaic letters were removed from use: Austria-Hungary church public school, Cetinje, 1836 Orders issued on 3 and 13 October 1914 prohibited the use of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet in the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, restricting its use solely to religious instruction. A decree issued on 3 January 1915 extended the ban to all public use of Serbian Cyrillic. Furthermore, an imperial order dated 25 October 1915 banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the sole exception of usage "within the scope of Serbian Orthodox Church authorities." World War II In 1941, the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state established by Nazi Germany, banned the use of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. The use of Cyrillic had already been restricted by regulations issued on 25 April 1941. In June 1941, the regime began purging so-called "Eastern" (i.e. Serbian) words from the Croatian language and closed Serbian schools. Islamic Amin al-Husseini, who was made chief architect of the Nazi German Genocide of Serbs and offensive in Bosnia, had Serbian Cyrillic banned and persecuted. In 1945, Krste Misirkov and Venko Markovski appropriated Serbian Cyrillic alphabet to create modern Macedonian alphabet. Yugoslavia The Serbian Cyrillic script was one of the two official scripts used to write Serbo-Croatian in Yugoslavia from its establishment in 1918, alongside Gaj's Latin alphabet (latinica). Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian Cyrillic ceased to be used at the national level in Croatia. However, it has remained an official script in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Contemporary period According to the Constitution of Serbia adopted in 2006, the Cyrillic script is defined as the sole official script for use in government and official communication. == Special letters ==

, Srpske narodne pjesme (Serbian Folk Poems), Vienna, 1841 The following typographical ligatures were developed specifically for the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet: • Vuk Stefanović Karadžić based the letters and on earlier designs by Serbian linguist, grammarian, and philologist Sava Mrkalj, who attempted to reform the Serbian language before Karadžić. These letters were created by combining (L) and (N) with the soft sign (Ь). • The letter was derived by Karadžić from the letter "Gea" used in older forms of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. • was introduced by Karadžić to represent the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate (IPA: ). It was based on, though visually distinct from, the Glagolitic letter Djerv, which had historically represented various palatalized consonants such as , , and . • The letter was designed by Serbian poet, prose writer, polyglot, and Orthodox bishop Lukijan Mušicki. Karadžić adopted this design, which was based on his own earlier modification of . • The letter was borrowed from the Latin alphabet, likely chosen by Karadžić in preference to the similar-looking Й used in other Cyrillic alphabets. == Differences from other Cyrillic alphabets ==

Serbian Cyrillic differs from other Slavic Cyrillic alphabets by omitting several letters. It does not use the hard sign () or soft sign (), due to the absence of a phonemic distinction between iotated and non-iotated consonants. Instead, it employs unique letters that historically arose as ligatures. It also lacks letters such as Russian/Belarusian , Ukrainian/Belarusian , the semivowels and , and the iotated vowels (), (), (), (), and (). These sounds are instead represented using digraphs with , as in . The letter also functions as a semivowel, replacing . The letter is not used in Serbian; when necessary, it is transliterated as , , or . Serbian italic and cursive forms of certain lowercase Cyrillic letters——differ significantly from their counterparts in Russian and other Cyrillic scripts. In the Serbian Cyrillic script, these letters take on distinct shapes: . However, their upright (non-italic) forms are generally standardized across languages, with no officially recognized national variants. This poses challenges in Unicode rendering, as the italic variants are the only ones that differ, and Unicode assigns the same code points regardless of visual style. Professional Serbian typography addresses this through dedicated fonts, but most texts displayed on consumer devices use East Slavic (e.g., Russian) glyphs even when Serbian language codes are applied. Some modern font families—such as those developed by Adobe, Microsoft (from Windows Vista onward), and others—support Serbian-specific Cyrillic shapes in both regular and italic styles. When supported by the font and rendering engine, correct glyphs can be displayed by marking text with appropriate language codes. For example: • бгдпт produces Serbian forms: бгдпт • бгдпт produces Russian forms: бгдпт In italic: • бгдпт produces: бгдпт • бгдпт produces: бгдпт Since Unicode does not distinguish between these national glyph variants at the character level, font and language-tag support is required to render the correct form. == Keyboard layout ==

The standard Serbian keyboard layout for personal computers is as follows: : == Polling ==