Domains of use

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Where Cyrillic lives, and where Latin does

You can already read both Serbian alphabets: in the lesson “Cyrillic print” we worked out how the letters turn into sounds. This lesson is about something else: where and when you will meet each script. Serbian is practically the only European language that keeps two alphabets in full everyday use at once. (Next door, Bosnian and Montenegrin recognise both alphabets too, but in everyday life Latin clearly prevails there.) Serbian lives with this double writing quite comfortably: one shop sign in Cyrillic, the next in Latin, a form one way, an advert the other. In Serbia you will need to read both.

Serbs call their two alphabets ćirilica (“Cyrillic”) and latinica (“Latin script”). Why two scripts at all? Cyrillic is the original, traditional script of the Serbs, the script of church and state. Latin came later and put down roots in the shared Yugoslav space of the twentieth century, where Serbian, Croatian and Slovene lived side by side; over the decades it became the script of the street, of trade and of technology. So one language ended up with two legitimate homes, and today most Serbs use both freely. Neither script is more “correct” than the other: they simply share out the domains of life between them.

The official domain: Cyrillic

Cyrillic is the script of the state: the 2006 Constitution says so in Article 10, and a 2021 law on the use of Serbian in public life and the protection of Cyrillic made it firmer still. Documents, public offices and schools use it, street names are written in it, and the public broadcaster uses it too. Cyrillic is what you will see on:

Where the state speaks, it speaks Cyrillic. An office’s stamp, the letterhead of an official form, a ministry sign, the address plate on a building: all of these are Cyrillic by default. That is why the first documents a newcomer receives will most likely be written this way.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

Where Cyrillic lives, and where Latin does

Serbian lives in digraphia: one language, two alphabets. Cyrillic and Latin match letter for letter (both follow Vuk Karadžić’s rule “one letter, one sound”): Београд = Beograd, ноћ = noć (“night”), the same word in two sets of clothes. The clothes depend not on meaning but on the domain. Cyrillic is the original script of church and state; Latin came later, from the shared Yugoslav space of the twentieth century, and became the script of the street, trade and technology. Neither is more “correct”: they share out the domains.

Cyrillic: where the state speaks

Latin: where the state steps back

No law requires this: a shop needs a sign a tourist can read, an advert a familiar international typeface, a person in a chat the keyboard under their fingers. So everyday reading (menus, price tags, flat-to-rent ads) is mostly Latin, and everything official Cyrillic.

In Serbian: Dokument je na ćirilici. Na internetu pišemo latinicom. The word pismo is both “a letter” and “a script”: oba pisma, “both scripts”.

At a glance: what goes where