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0 pointsnecovek2d ago0 comments

Indeed: most notably, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin are all unambiguous with Cyrillic, but Latin script dominates, even in officially Cyrillic-first Serbia.

Again, it is seen as a political tool (pro-West or pro-Russia), when Cyrillic is technically better suited (there is certainly history as well, but that's very mixed up in the region).

Again, I am saying this as someone who has worked to implement things like full-text search, collation (lexical ordering/sorting) algorithms and tables, fonts and ligatures, functions like uppercase/titlecase/lowercase...

Eg. an already complex Unicode Collation Algorithm tables can never support exceptions with digraphs like "konjukcija" (nj is usually a digraph, but not here), etc.

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foobarian1d ago

The unique quirk with South Slavic languages is the linguistic work e.g. associated with Vuk Karadžić [1] which resulted in a cleaned up purely phonetic alphabet. This was done across the region and ended up getting plumbed through both alphabets, so e.g. the Croatians/Slovenes write in latin but with a handful of special characters for the unique sounds like "š" or the double-letter characters "dž" "lj", which also map 1-1 to stuff on the Serbian Cyrillic side.

It's the kind of legacy cleanup you love to see :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87

ymolodtsov2d ago

Serbia is still mostly Cyrillic though. It's a very interesting experiment since Croatia isn't and the languages are basically the same.

necovekOP1d ago

I invite you for a walk through Belgrade streets, maybe even with Google Street View. There will be Cyrillic in official signage, but ads and shop names will be predominately in Latin script. If there are some in Cyrillic, they are likely to be part of a newer "hipster" move to differentiate more for the tourists.

AndriyKunitsyn1d ago

There are so many Russian émigrés in Belgrade that you hear Russian more than Serbian in the city center.

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