Slavica

Slavica was presented in a book Nova Slovarica which was published in 1987 by Universal from Tuzla. In this book, author Rajko Igić presents a new writing system, Slavica, for Serbian and Croatian language. This alphabet is a combination of latin and cyrillic alphabets and is intended for people of the former Yugoslavia that speak essentially the same language, but write it in two different writing systems.

Organisation

The basis of slavica is 17 latin leters with 8 cyrilic letters used in the cases where latin scripts uses diacritics and combined letters. Five identical letters - a, e, o, j, k - are also used in this new script. In this way slavica follows the principle of one grapheme for one phoneme, a principle that has come out of cyrillic alphabet.

Implementation

The new alphabet has been tested in 1988. and 1989. by the students of primary school 'Mate Balota' in Buje, Croatia. New alphabet has been especially attractive to the people from Bosnia, Vojvodina and Istra. Strong opposition has been noted in these years by Croatian media. Slavica has been written about both before and after the civil war, in many daily newspapers (Večernje novosti, Front slobode, Dnevnik, etc) as well as some other magazines (American Psychologist in 1999; Pregled - Sarajevo, 2005; Prosvjetna poslanica - Tuzla in 2006). It is hard to predict whether, and if so when, will ex-Yugoslavian countries will consider the need for reform of their alphabets.