Romanization of Serbian

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A road sign in Serbia using Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The towns are Sid (pronounced [Si:d]), Novi Sad and Belgrade. Beograd in 25.jpg
A road sign in Serbia using Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The towns are Šid (pronounced [ʃiːd]), Novi Sad and Belgrade.

The romanization or Latinisation of Serbian is the representation of the Serbian language using Latin letters. Serbian is written in two alphabets, Serbian Cyrillic, a variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, and Gaj's Latin, or latinica, a variation of the Latin alphabet. Both are widely used in Serbia. The Serbian language is thus an example of digraphia.

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Main alphabets used in Europe around 1900: .mw-parser-output .legend{page-break-inside:avoid;break-inside:avoid-column}.mw-parser-output .legend-color{display:inline-block;min-width:1.25em;height:1.25em;line-height:1.25;margin:1px 0;text-align:center;border:1px solid black;background-color:transparent;color:black}.mw-parser-output .legend-text{} Latin script: Fraktur variant Latin script: Antiqua variant Cyrillic script Greek alphabet Arabic script Kalmyk-Mongolian script Scripts in Europe (1901).jpg
Main alphabets used in Europe around 1900:
   Latin script: Fraktur variant
  Latin script: Antiqua variant
   Kalmyk–Mongolian script

The two alphabets are almost directly and completely interchangeable. Romanization can be done with no errors, but, due to the use of digraphs in the Latin script (due to letters "nj" (њ), "lj" (љ), and "dž" (џ)), knowledge of Serbian is sometimes required to do proper transliteration from Latin back to Cyrillic. Standard Serbian currently uses both alphabets. A survey from 2014 showed that 47% of the Serbian population favors the Latin alphabet whereas 36% favors Cyrillic; the remaining 17% preferred neither. [1]

Use of romanization

Duro Danicic added the letter "D" instead of "Dj" in Croatian Academy 1882. Djura danicic.jpg
Đuro Daničić added the letter "Đ" instead of "Dj" in Croatian Academy 1882.

Serbo-Croatian was regarded as a single language since the 1850 Vienna Literary Agreement, to be written in two forms: one (Serb) in the adapted Serbian Cyrillic alphabet; the other (Croat) in the adapted Croatian Latin alphabet, [2] that is to say Gaj's Latin alphabet.

The Latin alphabet was not initially taught in schools in Serbia when it became independent in the 19th century. After a series of efforts by Serbian writers Ljubomir Stojanović and Jovan Skerlić, it became part of the school curriculum after 1914. [3]

During World War I, Austria-Hungary banned the Cyrillic alphabet in Bosnia [4] and its use in occupied Serbia was banned in schools. [5] Cyrillic was banned in the Independent State of Croatia in World War II. [6] The government of socialist Yugoslavia made some initial effort to promote romanization, use of the Latin alphabet even in the Orthodox Serbian and Montenegrin parts of Yugoslavia, but met with resistance. [7] The use of latinica did however become more common among Serbian speakers.

In late 1980s, a number of articles had been published in Serbia about a danger of Cyrillic being fully replaced by Latin, thereby endangering what was deemed a Serbian national symbol. [8]

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia, Gaj's Latin alphabet remained in use in Bosnian and Croatian standards of Serbo-Croatian. Another standard of Serbo-Croatian, Montenegrin, uses a slightly modified version of it.

In 1993, the authorities of Republika Srpska under Radovan Karadžić and Momčilo Krajišnik decided to proclaim Ekavian and Serbian Cyrillic to be official in Republika Srpska, which was opposed both by native Bosnian Serb writers at the time and the general public, and that decision was rescinded in 1994. [9] Nevertheless, it was reinstated in a milder form in 1996, and today still the use of Serbian Latin is officially discouraged in Republika Srpska, in favor of Cyrillic. [10]

Article 10 of the Constitution of Serbia [11] adopted by a referendum in 2006 defined Cyrillic as the official script in Serbia, while Latin was given the status of "Script in official use".

Today Serbian is more likely to be romanized in Montenegro than in Serbia. [12] Exceptions to this include Serbian websites where use of Latin alphabet is often more convenient, and increasing use in tabloid and popular media such as Blic , Danas and Svet. [13] More established media, such as the formerly state-run Politika , and Radio Television of Serbia, [14] or foreign Google News, [15] Voice of Russia [16] and Facebook tend to use Cyrillic script. [17] Some websites offer the content in both scripts, using Cyrillic as the source and auto generating Romanized version.

In 2013 in Croatia there were massive protests against official Cyrillic signs on local government buildings in Vukovar. [18]

Romanization of names

Serbian place names

Serbian place names are consistently spelled in latinica using the mapping that exists between the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet and Gaj's Latin alphabet.

Serbian personal names

Serbian personal names are usually romanized exactly the same way as place names. This is particularly the case with consonants which are common to other Slavic Latin alphabets - Č, Ć, Š, Ž, Dž and Đ.

A problem is presented by the letter Đ/đ that represents the affricate [ dʑ ] (the same sound written as <j> in most romanizations of Japanese, similar, though not identical to english <j> as in "Jam"), which is still sometimes represented by "Dj". The letter Đ was not part of the original Gaj's alphabet, but was added by Đuro Daničić in the 19th century. A transcribed "Dj" is still sometimes encountered in rendering Serbian names into English (e.g. Novak Djokovic), though strictly Đ should be used (as in Croatian).

Foreign names

Sign of George Washington street in Belgrade George Washington Street sign Belgrade.JPG
Sign of George Washington street in Belgrade

In Serbian, foreign names are phonetically transliterated into both Latin and Cyrillic. For example, in Serbian, George Washington becomes Džordž Vašington or Џорџ Вашингтон, Winston Churchill becomes Vinston Čerčil or Винстон Черчил and Charles de Gaulle Šarl de Gol or Шарл де Гол. [19] This change also happens in some European languages that use the Latin alphabet such as Latvian. The name Catherine Ashton for instance gets transliterated into Ketrin Ešton or Кетрин Ештон in Serbian. An exception to this are place names which are so well known as to have their own form (exonym): just as English has Vienna, Austria (and not German Wien, Österreich) so Croatian and Serbian have Beč, Austrija (Serbian Cyrillic : Беч, Аустрија).

Incomplete romanization

The incomplete romanization of Serbian is written using the English alphabet, also known as ASCII Serbian, by dropping diacritics. It is commonly used in SMS messages, comments on the Internet or e-mails, mainly because users do not have a Serbian keyboard installed. Serbian is a fully phonetic language with 30 sounds that can be represented with 30 Cyrillic letters, or with letters of 27 Gaj's Latin alphabet and three digraphs ("nj" for "њ", ”lj" for "љ", and "dž" for "џ"). In its ASCII form, the number of used letters drops down to 22, as the letters "q", "w", "x" and "y" are not used. This leads to some ambiguity due to homographs, however context is usually sufficient to clarify these issues.

Using incomplete romanization does not allow for easy transliteration back to Cyrillic without significant manual work. Google tried using a machine learning approach to solving this problem and developed an interactive text input tool that enables typing Serbian in ASCII and auto-converting to Cyrillic. [20] However, manual typing is still required with occasional disambiguation selection from the pop-up menu.

Tools for romanization

Serbian text can be converted from Cyrillic to Latin and vice versa automatically by computer. There are add-in tools available for Microsoft Word [21] and OpenOffice.org, [22] as well as command line tools for Linux, MacOS and Windows.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyrillic script</span> Writing system used for various Eurasian languages

The Cyrillic script, Slavonic script or simply Slavic script is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, and used by many other minority languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serbo-Croatian</span> South Slavic language

Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serbian language</span> South Slavic language of the Balkans

Serbian is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs. It is the official and national language of Serbia, one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina and co-official in Montenegro and Kosovo. It is a recognized minority language in Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Comparison of standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian</span> Comparison of registers of the Serbo-Croatian language

Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are different national variants and official registers of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tshe</span> Cyrillic letter

Tshe is a letter of the Cyrillic script, used only in the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, where it represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate, somewhat like the pronunciation of ⟨ch⟩ in "chew"; however, it must not be confused with the voiceless retroflex affricate Che (Ч ч), which represents and which also exists in Serbian Cyrillic script. The sound of Tshe is produced from the voiceless alveolar plosive by iotation. Tshe is the 23rd letter in the Serbian alphabet. It was first used by Dositej Obradović as a revival of the old Cyrillic letter Djerv (Ꙉ), and was later adopted in the 1818 Serbian dictionary of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. The equivalent character to Tshe in Gaj's Latin alphabet is Ć.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lje</span> Cyrillic letter

Lje, or Lle is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nje</span> Cyrillic letter

Nje, Nye, or Ñe is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dzhe</span> Letter of the Cyrillic script

Dzhe, also spelled dže, is a letter of the Cyrillic script used in Macedonian and varieties of Serbo-Croatian to represent the voiced postalveolar affricate, like the pronunciation of j in “jump”.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ž</span> Latin letter Z with caron

The grapheme Ž is formed from Latin Z with the addition of caron. It is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiced postalveolar fricative, the sound of English g in mirage, s in vision, or Portuguese and French j. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with, but the lowercase ž is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. In addition, ž is used as the romanisation of Cyrillic ж in ISO 9 and scientific transliteration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gaj's Latin alphabet</span> Form of Latin script used to write Serbo-Croatian

Gaj's Latin alphabet, also known as abeceda or gajica, is the form of the Latin script used for writing Serbo-Croatian and all of its standard varieties: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian.

The orthography of the Macedonian language includes an alphabet consisting of 31 letters, which is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script, as well as language-specific conventions of spelling and punctuation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dž</span> Latin digraph used in Serbo-Croatian

Dž is the seventh letter of the Gaj's Latin alphabet for Serbo-Croatian, after D and before Đ. It is pronounced. Dž is a digraph that corresponds to the letter Dzhe (Џ/џ) of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. It is also the tenth letter of the Slovak alphabet. Although several other languages also use the letter combination DŽ, they treat it as a pair of the letters D and Ž, not as a single distinct letter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ljudevit Gaj</span> Croatian linguist, writer and politician

Ljudevit Gaj was a Croatian linguist, politician, journalist and writer. He was one of the central figures of the pan-Slavist Illyrian movement.

Scientific transliteration, variously called academic, linguistic, international, or scholarly transliteration, is an international system for transliteration of text from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script (romanization). This system is most often seen in linguistics publications on Slavic languages.

The romanization of Macedonian is the transliteration of text in Macedonian from the Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet. Romanization can be used for various purposes, such as rendering of proper names in foreign contexts, or for informal writing of Macedonian in environments where Cyrillic is not easily available. Official use of romanization by North Macedonia's authorities is found, for instance, on road signage and in passports. Several different codified standards of transliteration currently exist and there is widespread variability in practice.

YUSCII is an informal name for several JUS standards for 7-bit character encoding. These include:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serbian Cyrillic alphabet</span> 9th century official script of the Serbian language

The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is a variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language originated in medieval Serbia. Reformed in 19th century by the Serbian philologist and linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write modern standard Serbian, the other being Gaj's Latin alphabet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyrillic alphabets</span> Related alphabets based on Cyrillic scripts

Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arebica</span> Serbo-Croatian variant of the Arabic script

Arebica is a variant of the Arabic script used to write the Serbo-Croatian language. It was used mainly between the 15th and 19th centuries and is frequently categorized as part of Aljamiado literature. During Austro-Hungarian rule, there were unsuccessful efforts by Bosnian Muslims to grant Arebica equal status alongside Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Apart from literature, Arebica was used in religious schools and administration, though in much less use than other scripts.

The Montenegrin alphabet is the collective name given to "Abeceda" and "Азбука", the writing systems used to write the Montenegrin language. It was adopted on 9 June 2009 by the Montenegrin Minister of Education, Sreten Škuletić and replaced the Serbian Cyrillic and Gaj's Latin alphabets in use at the time.

References

  1. ↑ "Ivan Klajn: Ćirilica će postati arhaično pismo". 16 December 2014.
  2. ↑ The World and Its Peoples 2009 - Page 1654 "Until modern times, Serbo-Croat was regarded as a single language, written in two forms: one (Serb) in the Cyrillic alphabet; the other (Croat) in ...
  3. ↑ Naimark, Norman M.; Case, Holly (2003). Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Stanford University Press. pp. 95–96. ISBN   0804745943 . Retrieved 2012-04-18.
  4. ↑ John Horne (16 March 2010). A Companion to World War I. John Wiley & Sons. p. 375. ISBN   978-1-4443-2364-1 . Retrieved 26 April 2013.
  5. ↑ Serbia's Great War 1914-1918. Purdue University Press. 2007. p. 231. ISBN   978-1-55753-477-4 . Retrieved 26 April 2013.
  6. ↑ Gregory R. Copley (1992). Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy. Copley & Associates. p. 17. Retrieved 26 April 2013.
  7. ↑ The Social construction of written communication Bennett A. Rafoth, Donald L. Rubin - 1988 "Yugoslavian efforts to romanize Serbian (Kalogjera, 1985) and Chinese efforts to romanize Mandarin (De Francis, 1977b, 1984; Seybolt & Chiang, 1979) reveal that even authoritarian regimes may have to accept only limited success when the price of complete victory is too high."
  8. ↑ Bagdasarov, Artur (2018). "Ethnolinguistic policy in socialist Yugoslavia". Filologija (71). Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts: 51. doi:10.21857/m8vqrtze29. ISSN   1848-8919 . Retrieved 15 August 2021.
  9. ↑ Greenberg, Robert D. (2004). Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration. Oxford University Press. pp. 78–79. ISBN   0191514551 . Retrieved 2012-04-18.
  10. ↑ Greenberg, Robert D. (2004). Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration. Oxford University Press. pp. 82–83. ISBN   0191514551 . Retrieved 2012-04-18.
  11. ↑ "Constitution Principles". Constitution of the Republic of Serbia. Government of Serbia . Retrieved 2013-04-26.
  12. ↑ One thousand languages: living, endangered, and lost - Page 46 Peter Austin - 2008 "Croatian and Bosnian are written in the Latin alphabet; Serbian in both Serbia and Bosnia is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Both scripts are used for Serbian in Montenegro."
  13. ↑ "Home". svet.rs.
  14. ↑ "ТАНЈУГ | Новинска агенција".
  15. ↑ https://news.google.com/%5B%5D
  16. ↑ "Глас Русије". Archived from the original on 2013-04-24. Retrieved 2013-04-26.
  17. ↑ Hitting the headlines in Europe: a country-by-country guide Page 166 Cathie Burton, Alun Drake - 2004 "The former state-run paper, Politika, which kept its retro style until very recently, using Serbian Cyrillic rather than the Latin alphabet, has been bought by a German company and is modernizing rapidly. There are a host of tabloids, .."
  18. ↑ Agence France-Presse, April 7, 2013 Croatians protest against Cyrillic signs in Vukovar
  19. ↑ Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a grammar: with sociolinguistic commentary - Page 3 Ronelle Alexander - 2006 -"... name in original Serbian (Cyrillic) Serbian (Latin) Croatian George Џорџ Džordž; George Mary Мери Meri Mary; Winston Churchill Винстон Черчил Vinston Čerčil Winston Churchill; Charles de Gaulle Шарл де Гол Šarl de Gol Charles de Gaulle;"
  20. ↑ Google input tools for Serbian
  21. ↑ Office 2003 Add-in: Latin and Cyrillic Transliteration
  22. ↑ OOoTranslit add-on for OpenOffice
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