Gaj's Latin alphabet

Gaj's Latin alphabet () is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for Serbo-Croatian; Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. It was devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1835, based on Jan Hus's Czech alphabet. A corresponding Cyrillic script, the vukovica (Serbian Cyrillic), is used for Serbian and Montenegrin. A slightly reduced version is used as the script of the Slovene language.

The alphabet

It consists of thirty upper and lowercase letters:

The original Gaj's alphabet contained a digraph ‹dj›, which was later replaced by the letter ‹đ›.

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. ). When the individual letters are pronounced, they are pronounced similar to the German alphabet: a, be, ce, če, će, de, dže, đe, e, ef, ge, ha, i, je, ka, el, elj, em, en, enj, o, pe, er, es, eš, te, u, ve, ze, že. These rules for pronunciation of individual letters are common as far as the 22 letters that match the basic modern Latin alphabet are concerned. The use of others is mostly limited to the context of linguistics, while in mathematics, ‹j› is commonly pronounced jot, as in German. The missing four letters are pronounced as follows: ‹q› as ku or kju, ‹w› as dublve or duplo ve, ‹x› as iks, ‹y› as ipsilon.

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