Slavica (alphabet)

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Slavica is a new writing system for the Serbian and Croatian languages that was proposed by Rajko Igić in his 1987 book, Nova Slovarica, published by Universal from Tuzla. The alphabet is a combination of Latin and Cyrillic alphabets and is intended for people of the former Yugoslavia that speak essentially the same language, but write it in two different writing systems.

[edit] Organisation

The basis of Slavica is 18 Latin letters, with 8 Cyrillic letters used in the cases where the Latin script uses diacritics and digraphs. Four letters common to both alphabets — a, e, o, and j — are also used in this new script. In this way, Slavica follows the principle of one grapheme for one phoneme, a principle that has come out of Cyrillic alphabet.^{[citation needed]}

Letter	IPA sound	Original alphabet
A a	/a/	either
B b	/b/	Latin
C c	/ts/	Latin
Ч ч	/tʃ/	Cyrillic
Ћ ћ	/tɕ/	Cyrillic
D d	/d/	Latin
Џ	/dʒ/	Cyrillic
Ђ ђ	/dʑ/	Cyrillic
E e	/ɛ/	either
F f	/f/	Latin
G g	/g/	Latin
H h	/h/	Latin
I i	/i/	Latin
J j	/j/	either
K k	/k/	Latin
L l	/l/	Latin
Љ љ	/ʎ/	Cyrillic
M m	/m/	Latin
N n	/n/	Latin
Њ њ	/ɲ/	Cyrillic
O o	/ɔ/	either
P p	/p/	Latin
R r	/r/	Latin
S s	/s/	Latin
Ш ш	/ʃ/	Cyrillic
T t	/t/	Latin
U u	/u/	Latin
V v	/v/	Latin
Z z	/z/	Latin
Ж ж	/ʒ/	Cyrillic

[edit] Implementation

The new alphabet was tested in 1988 and 1989 by the students of primary school Mate Balota in Buje, Croatia. It has been especially attractive to the people from Bosnia, Vojvodina and Istra.^{[citation needed]} Strong opposition has been noted in these years by the Croatian media. Slavica has been written about both before and after the civil war, in many daily newspapers (Večernje novosti, Front slobode, Dnevnik, etc.) as well as some other magazines (American Psychologist in 1999; Pregled, Sarajevo, 2005; Prosvjetna poslanica, Tuzla, in 2006).