Slavica is a new writing system for Serbo-Croatian language that was proposed by Rajko Igić in his 1987 book, Nova Slovarica, published by Universal from Tuzla. The alphabet is a combination of Gaj's Latin and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets and is intended for people of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that speak the same language, but write it in two different writing systems.
The basis of Slavica is 17 Latin letters, with 8 Cyrillic letters used in the cases where the Latin script uses diacritics and digraphs. Five letters common to both alphabets — a, e, o, j, and k — are also used in this new script. In this way, Slavica follows the principle of one grapheme for one phoneme, a principle that come from Cyrillic script.
| 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 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/ | either |
| 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 |
The new alphabet was tested in 1988 and 1989 by the students of primary school Mate Balota in Buje, Croatia. According to several articles in daily press,1987 and 1988, it has been especially attractive to the people from Bosnia, Vojvodina and Istria. However, 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).