Romanization of Serbian

TheromanizationorLatinisation of Serbianis the representation of theSerbian languageusing Latin letters. Serbian is written in two Alpha bets,Serbian Cyrillic,a variation of theCyrillic Alpha bet,andGaj's Latin,orlatinica,a variation of theLatin Alpha bet.Both are widely used in Serbia. The Serbian language is thus an example ofdigraphia.

A road sign in Serbia using Cyrillic and Latin Alpha bets. The towns areŠid(pronounced [ʃiːd]),Novi SadandBelgrade.

Main Alpha bets used in Europe around 1900:

Latin script:Frakturvariant

Latin script:Antiquavariant

Cyrillic script

Greek Alpha bet

Arabic script

Kalmyk–Mongolianscript

The two Alpha bets are almost directly and completely interchangeable. Romanization can be done with no errors, but, due to the use ofdigraphsin 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 Alpha bets. A survey from 2014 showed that 47% of the Serbian population favors the Latin Alpha bet whereas 36% favors Cyrillic; the remaining 17% preferred neither.

Use of romanization

Đuro Daničićadded the letter "Đ" instead of "Dj" inCroatian Academy1882.

Serbo-Croatianwas regarded as a single language since the 1850Vienna Literary Agreement,to be written in two forms: one (Serb) in the adapted Serbian Cyrillic Alpha bet; the other (Croat) in the adapted Croatian Latin Alpha bet,that is to sayGaj's Latin Alpha bet.

The Latin Alpha bet was not initially taught in schools in Serbia when it became independent in the 19th century. After a series of efforts by Serbian writersLjubomir StojanovićandJovan Skerlić,it became part of the school curriculum after 1914.

During World War I,Austria-Hungarybanned the Cyrillic Alpha bet in Bosniaand its use in occupied Serbia was banned in schools.Cyrillic was banned in theIndependent State of Croatiain World War II.The government ofsocialist Yugoslaviamade some initial effort to promote romanization, use of the Latin Alpha bet even in the Orthodox Serbian and Montenegrin parts of Yugoslavia, but met with resistance.The use oflatinicadid 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.

Following thebreakup of Yugoslavia,Gaj's Latin Alpha bet remained in use inBosnianandCroatianstandards ofSerbo-Croatian.Another standard of Serbo-Croatian,Montenegrin,uses a slightly modified version of it.

In 1993, the authorities ofRepublika SrpskaunderRadovan KaradžićandMomčilo Krajišnikdecided to proclaimEkavianandSerbian Cyrillicto be official inRepublika Srpska,which was opposed both by nativeBosnian Serbwriters at the time and the general public, and that decision was rescinded in 1994.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.

Article 10 of theConstitution of Serbiaadopted by a referendum in 2006 defined Cyrillic as the official script inSerbia,while Latin was given the status of "Script in official use".

Today Serbian is more likely to be romanized inMontenegrothan in Serbia.Exceptions to this include Serbian websites where use of Latin Alpha bet is often more convenient, and increasing use in tabloid and popular media such asBlic,DanasandSvet.More established media, such as the formerly state-runPolitika,andRadio Television of Serbia,or foreignGoogle News,Voice of RussiaandFacebooktend to use Cyrillic script.Some websites offer the content in both scripts, using Cyrillic as the source and auto generating Romanized version.

In 2013 in Croatia there weremassive protests against official Cyrillic signson local government buildings inVukovar.

Romanization of names

Serbian place names

Serbian place names are consistently spelled inlatinicausing the mapping that exists between theSerbian Cyrillic Alpha betandGaj's Latin Alpha bet.

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 otherSlavicLatin Alpha bets -Č,Ć,Š,Ž,DžandĐ.

A problem is presented by the letterĐ/đthat represents theaffricate[dʑ](the same sound written as <j> in most romanizations ofJapanese,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 Alpha bet, but was added byĐuro Daničićin the 19th century. Atranscribed"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 ofGeorge Washingtonstreet inBelgrade

In Serbian, foreign names are phoneticallytransliteratedinto both Latin and Cyrillic. For example, in Serbian,George WashingtonbecomesDžordž VašingtonorЏорџ Вашингтон,Winston ChurchillbecomesVinston ČerčilorВинстон ЧерчилandCharles de GaulleŠarl de GolorШарл де Гол.This change also happens in some European languages that use the Latin Alpha bet such asLatvian.The nameCatherine Ashtonfor instance gets transliterated intoKetrin EštonorКетрин Ештонin Serbian. An exception to this are place names which are so well known as to have their own form (exonym): just as English hasVienna,Austria(and notGermanWien, Österreich) so Croatian and Serbian haveBeč, Austrija(Serbian Cyrillic:Беч, Аустрија).

Incomplete romanization

The incomplete romanization of Serbian is written using theEnglish Alpha bet,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 Alpha bet 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 tohomographs,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.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 forMicrosoft WordandOpenOffice.org,as well as command line tools for Linux, MacOS and Windows.