Serbian Cyrillic Alphabet - Differences From Other Cyrillic Alphabets

Differences From Other Cyrillic Alphabets

Serbian Cyrillic does not use several letters encountered in other Slavic Cyrillic alphabets. It does not use hard sign (ъ) and soft sign (ь), but the aforementioned soft-sign ligatures instead. It does not have Russian/Belorussian Э, the semi-vowels Й or ў, nor the iotated letters Я (Russian/Bulgarian ya), Є (Ukrainian ye), Ї (yi), Ё (Russian yo) or Ю (yu), and are instead written as two separate letters: Ja, Je, Jи, Jo, Jy. J can also be used as a semi-vowel. The letter Щ is not used. When necessary, it is transliterated as either ШЧ or ШT.

Serbian and Macedonian italic and cursive forms of lowercase letters б, п, г, д, and т, differ from those used in other Cyrillic alphabets (in Serbian ш is optionally underlined, whereas in Macedonian is not). That presents an obstacle in Unicode modeling, as the glyphs differ only in italic versions, and historically non-italic letters have been used in the same code positions. Serbian professional typography uses fonts specially crafted for the language to overcome the problem, but texts printed from common computers contain East Slavic rather than Serbian italic glyphs. Adobe Cyrillic fonts and the new Microsoft Windows Vista font family include the Serbian variations (both regular and italic) as well as a few other font houses. The letters can easily be implemented using Adobe Illustrator, for example.