Home Discussion Topics Dictionary Almanac

Signup Login

Croatian alphabet

Overview

Gaj's Latin alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.During the...

devised by Croat Ljudevit Gaj

Ljudevit Gaj

Ljudevit Gaj was a Croatian linguist, politician, journalist and writer. He was the central person of the Croatian national reformation or the Illyrian Movement...

, in his 1830 book, Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskogo pravopisanja (A short primer of Croatian-Slavic orthography). It is the only script of the Croatian

Croatian language

Croatian is a South Slavic language which is used primarily in Croatia, by Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Croatian minorities in some neighbouring countries, in the Italian region of Molise, and parts of the Croatian diaspora....

standard language

Standard language

A standard language is a particular variety of a language that has been given either legal or quasi-legal status...

in current use, and one of the two scripts of the Bosnian

Bosnian language

Bosnian is a South Slavic language spoken primarily in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the region of Sandžak in Serbia and Montenegro, although it is also spoken in various places throughout the world, as many speakers were forced to become refugees during the Bosnian war...

and Serbian

Serbian language

Serbian is a South Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and in the Serbian diaspora...

standard languages. The script was also one of two official scripts used for the Serbo-Croatian language prior to the demise of Yugoslavia

Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the second half of World War II until it was formally dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro,...

Discussion

Ask a question about 'Croatian alphabet'

Start a new discussion about 'Croatian alphabet'

Answer questions from other users

Full Discussion Forum

Encyclopedia

Gaj's Latin alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

devised by Croat Ljudevit Gaj

Ljudevit Gaj

Ljudevit Gaj was a Croatian linguist, politician, journalist and writer. He was the central person of the Croatian national reformation or the Illyrian Movement...

, in his 1830 book, Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskogo pravopisanja (A short primer of Croatian-Slavic orthography). It is the only script of the Croatian

Croatian language

standard language

Standard language

A standard language is a particular variety of a language that has been given either legal or quasi-legal status...

in current use, and one of the two scripts of the Bosnian

Bosnian language

and Serbian

Serbian language

Serbian is a South Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and in the Serbian diaspora...

standard languages. The script was also one of two official scripts used for the Serbo-Croatian language prior to the demise of Yugoslavia

Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

. A slightly modified version is also used as the script for the Slovenian language

Slovenian language

Slovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.4 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia...

. The alphabet is also used for the Banat version of the Bulgarian language

Bulgarian language

Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian demonstrates several linguistic innovations that set it apart from all other Slavic languages except the Macedonian language, such as the elimination of case declension, the development of a suffixed definite...

.

It consists of thirty upper

Capital letters

Capital letters or majuscules [IPA pronunciation: /məˈdʒʌskjuls, ˈmædʒəˌskjuls/], in the Roman alphabet A, B, C, D, etc., may also be called capitals, or caps. Upper case, upper-case, or uppercase is also often used in this context as synonym of capital...

and lowercase letters:

Letter	Letter	Letter
A A The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled a; the plural is aes, though this is rare.- History :... , a	G G G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled gee.-History:The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish Latin voiced velar from voiceless... , g	O O O is the fifteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled o; the plural is oes, though this is rare.- History :... , o
B B B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled bee, plural bees.-History:The letter B might have started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet... , b	H H H is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in both British and American English is aitch , plural aitches, though it is also pronounced haitch in some dialects .-History:... , h	P P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled pee.-History:The Semitic Pê , as well as the Greek Π or π , and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized , a voiceless bilabial plosive.-Usage:In English and... , p
C C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiceless postalveolar affricate , and is equivalent to the voiceless postalveolar affricate, , or the voiceless retroflex affricate,... , c	I I I is the ninth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its English name is spelled i; the plural is ies, though this is rare.-History:... , i	R R R is the eighteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ar; its name in Hiberno-English is or .-History:... , r
Č C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiceless postalveolar affricate , and is equivalent to the voiceless postalveolar affricate, , or the voiceless retroflex affricate,... , č	J J Ĵ or ĵ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar fricative , and is equivalent to the voiced postalveolar fricative, , or the voiced retroflex fricative, .... , j	S S S is the nineteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ess, or usually es- when part of a compound word; the plural is esses.- Usage :... , s
Ć C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiceless postalveolar affricate , and is equivalent to the voiceless postalveolar affricate, , or the voiceless retroflex affricate,... , ć	K K K is the eleventh letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled kay.-History and usage:... , k	Š Š The grapheme Š, š is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative , including in phonetic transcription. Š and š are at Unicode codepoints U+0160 and U+0161, respectively... , š
D D D is the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled dee, plural dees.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this... , d	L L Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni and Dogrib alphabets, and of several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language... , l	T T T is the twentieth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled tee. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :... , t
Dž Dž Dž is the seventh letter of the Croatian and Bosnian alphabets, and the Latin forms of Serbian and Macedonian, after D and before Đ. It is pronounced... , dž	Lj LJ LJ might be an acronym, abbreviation, or nickname for:LJ is the IATA code for Sierra National Airlines, Jin AirLJ, the sequent calculus of Gentzen's for intuitionist logicLiveJournalLinux JournalLa Jolla, CaliforniaLibrary Journal... , lj	U U U is the twenty-first letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled u; the plural is ues, though this is rare.-History:... , u
Đ D with stroke Đ is a letter of the Latin alphabet, formed from D with the addition of a bar or stroke through the letter. This is the same modification that was used to create eth , but eth is based on an insular variant of d while đ is based on its usual upright shape... , đ	M M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled em.-History:The letter M derives its shape from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water. It is known that Semitic people working in Egypt c... , m	V V V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled vee.-The letter:The letter V ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.... , v
E E E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. It is also the second vowel in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled e; the plural is ees, though this is rare... , e	N N N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled en.- Usage :N represents the dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with is , which represents a velar nasal in a variety of languages,... , n	Z Z Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In many dialects of English, the letter's name is zed, , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta . In American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form... , z
F F F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ef or eff.-History:The origin of F is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the sound /v/, and originally probably represented either a "hook" or a "club"... , f	Nj Nj Nj or NJ can stand for:New Jersey Nanojoule , an SI unit of energy equal to 10^-9 joulesNj Napierville Junction Railway*Nordjyske Jernbaner, a Danish railway company... , nj	Ž Ž The grapheme Ž is formed from Latin Z with the addition of háček. It is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiced postalveolar fricative , including phonetic transcription. This sound is similar to English g in genre or Portuguese and French j... , ž

The original Gaj's alphabet contained a digraph , which was later replaced by the letter <Đ>.

The letters don't have names, and consonants are normally pronounced as such when spelling is necessary (or followed by a short schwa

Schwa

In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...

, e.g. /fə/). In science and mathematics, only 26 letters of the basic modern Latin alphabet

Basic modern Latin alphabet

The Modern basic Latin alphabet is a Latin-derived alphabet and comprises 26 letters. It is codified in ISO/IEC 646 and in the "Basic Latin" range for the Latin characters in Unicode. The upper case is at 0041-005A, lower at 0061-007A...

are used, and in those contexts they're named as in German alphabet

German alphabet

The modern German alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 26 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet:- Rare letters :...

, with the exception of V (ve) and W (dublve).

Digraphs

Note that <Dž

Dž

Dž is the seventh letter of the Croatian and Bosnian alphabets, and the Latin forms of Serbian and Macedonian, after D and before Đ. It is pronounced...

>, , and are considered to be single letters they are digraphs

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

. This means that:

In dictionaries, njegov comes after novine, in a separate NJ section after the end of the N section, and bolje comes after bolnica, and so forth.
In vertical writing (such as on signs), , , are nevertheless written horizontally, as a unit. For instance, if mjenjačnica ('Bureau de Change
Bureau de Change
A bureau de change or currency exchange is a business whose customers exchange one currency for another...

') is written vertically, appears on the fourth line (but note and appear separately on the first and second lines, respectively, because contains two letters, not one). In crossword
Crossword
A crossword is a word puzzle that normally takes the form of a square or rectangular grid of black and white squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages which are written left-to-right, the answer...

puzzles, , , each occupy a single square.

In cases where words are written with a space between each letter (such as on signs), each of these letters is written together. For instance: M J E NJ A Č N I C A.

In cases where only the initial letter of a word is capitalized, only the first of the two component letters is capitalized: Njemačka and not NJemačka. In Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

, the form Nj is referred to as titlecase, as opposed to the uppercase form NJ, representing one of the few cases where titlecase and uppercase differ. Uppercase would be used if the entire word was capitalized: NJEMAČKA.

Origins

The Croatian Latin was mostly designed by Ljudevit Gaj

Ljudevit Gaj

Ljudevit Gaj was a Croatian linguist, politician, journalist and writer. He was the central person of the Croatian national reformation or the Illyrian Movement...

, who modelled it after Czech

Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. Czech is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser extent, to Polish and Sorbian. - Official status :Czech is widely...

and Polish

Polish language

Polish is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet which corresponds basically to the Latin alphabet with a few additions...

, and invented Lj/lj, Nj/nj and Dž/dž. In 1830 in Buda he printed the book Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ("Brief basics of the Croatian-Slavonic orthography"), which was the first common Croatian orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography. Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós and γράφειν...

book. It was not the first ever Croatian orthography work, as it was preceded by works of Rajmund Đamanjić (1639), Ignjat Đurđević and Pavao Ritter Vitezović

Pavao Ritter Vitezovic

Pavao Ritter Vitezović was a noted Croatian writer, historian, linguist and publisher.Pavao Ritter Vitezović was born in Senj to a family of a frontier soldier. His father was descended from a German immigrant from Alsace, and his mother was Croatian...

. The Croats had previously used the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented.

Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and the Czech orthography

Czech alphabet

The Czech alphabet is a version of the Latin alphabet, used when writing Czech. Its basic principles are "one sound - one letter" and the addition of diacritical marks above letters to represent sounds alien to Latin...

, making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. His alphabet mapped completely on Serbian Cyrillic which was standardized by Vuk Karadžić a few years before. Đuro Daničić added the letter <Đ/đ>.

Computing

In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the proper character encoding

Character encoding

A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...

to use to write text in Latin Croatian on computers.

An attempt was made to apply the 7-bit "YUSCII
YUSCII
YUSCII was an informal name for JUS I.B1.002 and JUS I.B1.003 , national variant of ISO 646, 7-bit Latinic character encoding standard, and used in Yugoslavia before widespread use of later ISO-8859-2, Microsoft and Unicode standards...

" (later adapted to CROSCII, sometimes jokingly called žabeceda (žaba=frog, abeceda=alphabet, because ASCII @, sorting before A, encodes Ž)), which included the five letters with diacritics at the expense of five non-letter characters ([, ], {, }, @), but it was ultimately unsuccessful. Other short-lived vendor-specific efforts were also undertaken.
The 8-bit
8-bit
Eight-bit CPUs normally use an 8-bit data bus and a 16-bit address bus which means that their address space is limited to 64 KB. This is not a "natural law", however, so there are exceptions....

ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) standard was developed by ISO, but
MS-DOS
MS-DOS
MS-DOS is an operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems and was the main operating system for personal computers during the 1980s. It was preceded by M-DOS , designed and copyrighted by Microsoft in 1979...

introduced 8-bit encoding CP852
Code page 852
Code page 852 is a code page to be used under MS-DOS with Central European languages that use Latin script ....

for Central European languages, and
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces...

spread yet another 8-bit encoding called CP1250, which had a few letters mapped one-to-one with ISO 8859-2, but also had some mapped elsewhere.
Apple
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and manufactures consumer electronics and computer software products. The company's best-known hardware products include Macintosh computers, the iPod and the iPhone...

uses yet another encoding
Macintosh Central European encoding
Macintosh Central European encoding is used in Apple Macintosh computers to represent texts in Central European and Southeastern European languages that use Latin script....

.
EBCDIC
EBCDIC
Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE, as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS...

also has Latin-2 encoding, Code Page 01153.

The preferred character encoding

Character encoding

for Croatian today is either the ISO 8859-2, or the Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

encoding UTF-8

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet is backwards compatible with ASCII...

(with two bytes or 16 bits necessary to use the letters with diacritics). However, one can still find programs and, more importantly, databases that use CP1250, CP852

Code page 852

Code page 852 is a code page to be used under MS-DOS with Central European languages that use Latin script ....

or even CROSCII, the former still sometimes being considered de-facto standard.

The Gaj alphabet for Slovene language

Since the early 1840s, Gaj's alphabet was increasingly used for the Slovene language. In the beginning, Slovene authors who treated Slovene as a variant of Serbo-Croatian (such as Stanko Vraz

Stanko Vraz

Stanko Vraz also known as Jakob Frass was a Slovene-born Croatian poet.Born in the small village of Cerovec in Lower Styria, Austrian Empire , Stanko Vraz was one of the most important figures of the Illyrian Movement in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia. He was the first Croatian to earn his...

) most commonly used it, but it was later accepted by a large spectrum of Slovene-writing authors. The breakthrough came when the Slovene conservative leader Janez Bleiweis

Janez Bleiweis

Janez Bleiweis was a Slovene conservative politician and public figure. Already during his lifetime, he was called father of the nation....

started using Gaj's script in his journal Kmetijske in rokodelske novice
Kmetijske in rokodelske novice
Kmetijske in rokodelske novice , frequently referred to simply as Novice , was a Slovene language newspaper in the 19th century, which had an important role in the Slovene national revival....

("Peasant's and Artisan's News"), which was read by a wide public in the countriside. By 1850, Gaj's alphabet (known as gajica in Slovene) became the only official Slovene alphabet, replacing three other writing systems which circulated in the Slovenian Lands since the 1830s: the traditional one, called bohoričica (after its inventor, Adam Bohorič

Adam Bohoric

Adam Bohorič was a Slovene Protestant preacher, teacher and author of the first grammar of the Slovene language....

), and the two innovative proposals by the Peter Dajnko

Peter Dajnko

Peter Dajnko was a Slovene priest, author and linguist, known primarily as the inventor of an innovative proposal for the writing system for the Slovene language - the Dajnko alphabet or dajnčica....

(the dajnčica) and Franc Serafin Metelko

Franc Serafin Metelko

Franc Serafin Metelko, also known as Fran Metelko was a Slovene Roman Catholic priest, author and philologist, most famous for his proposal of a new script for the Slovene language, called the Metelko alphabet, which was ment to replace the traditional Bohorič alphabet, used since late 16th...

(the metelčica).

The Slovene version of Gaj's alphabet differs from the Croatian one in the following traits:

the Slovene alphabet doesn't have the characters <Ć> and <Đ>; the sounds these letters represent are not present in the Slovene language;
in the Slovenian variant, the digraphs and are treated as two separate letters and represent separate sounds (e.g. the word polje
Polje
A polje is a large flat plain in karst territory, with areas usually 5 to 400 km². The name derives from the word for "field" in the Slovene language, also found in other Slavic languages....

is pronounced in Slovenian, as opposed to in Croatian).
while the phoneme /dʒ/ exists in modern Slovenian and is written , it's only used in borrowed words, and D and Ž are considered separate letters, not a digraph.

While the Serbo-Croatian alphabet is almost completely phonetic (that is, each sound is represented by a single letter or digraph, and each letter or digraph stands for only one sound), the Slovene alphabet, although following the same principle, has numerous exceptions.

Differences with the Czech, Slovak and Polish versions

Lacks the accented letters (á, é, í, ĺ, ó, ŕ, ú, ý), palatised consonants (ď, ľ, ň, ř, ť) and other special characters (ě, ô, ů, etc..) found in Czech and Slovak.
The Polish ą, ę, ń, ó, ś, ł, ź, ż are not used.
the Letters Q, W and Y and diagraph CH are used only in foreign words.
The digraph Lj translates Slovak ľ. Nj is the equivalent of Polish ń and Czech and Slovak ň. The unique đ matches the Polish dź, while dž matches dż.