Gaj's Latin alphabet

Gaj's Latin alphabet
Gajeva latinica
Gaj's Latin alphabet; Gajeva latinica
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	early 19th century – present
Languages	Serbo-Croatian
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic alphabet Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Old Italic scripts Latin alphabet Czech alphabet Gaj's Latin alphabet; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Child systems	Slovene alphabet; Montenegrin Latin alphabet; Macedonian Latin alphabet; Bulgarian Latin Alphabet
Sister systems	Slovak alphabet; Latvian alphabet; Lithuanian alphabet
Unicode
Unicode range	subset of Latin
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Gaj's Latin alphabet (Serbo-Croatian: Gajeva latinica / Гајева латиница, pronounced [ɡâːjeva latǐnit͡sa]), also known as abeceda (Serbian Cyrillic: абецеда, pronounced [abet͡sěːda]) or gajica (Serbian Cyrillic: гајица, pronounced [ɡǎjit͡sa]), is the form of the Latin script used for writing Serbo-Croatian and all of its standard varieties: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. It contains 27 individual letters and 3 digraphs. Each letter (including digraphs) represents one Serbo-Croatian phoneme, yielding a highly phonemic orthography. It closely corresponds to the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet.

The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1835 during the Illyrian movement in ethnically Croatian parts of the Austrian Empire. It was largely based on Jan Hus's Czech alphabet and was meant to serve as a unified orthography for three Croat-populated kingdoms within the Austrian Empire at the time, namely Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia, and their three dialect groups, Kajkavian, Chakavian and Shtokavian, which historically utilized different spelling rules. The alphabet's final form was defined in the late 19th century.

A slightly reduced version is used as the alphabet for Slovene, and a slightly expanded version is used for modern standard Montenegrin. A modified version is used for the romanization of Macedonian. It further influenced alphabets of Romani languages that are spoken in Southeast Europe, namely Vlax and Balkan Romani.