Gaj's Latin Alphabet - Usage in The Slovene Language

Usage in The Slovene Language

Since the early 1840s, Gaj's alphabet was increasingly used for the Slovene language. In the beginning, it was Slovene authors who treated Slovene as a variant of Croatian (such as Stanko Vraz) who most commonly used it, but it was later accepted by a large spectrum of Slovene-writing authors. The breakthrough came when the Slovene conservative leader Janez Bleiweis started using Gaj's script in his journal Kmetijske in rokodelske novice ("Agricultural and Artisan News)"), which was read by a wide public in the countryside. By 1850, Gaj's alphabet (known as gajica in Slovene) became the only official Slovene alphabet, replacing three other writing systems which circulated in the Slovene Lands since the 1830s: the traditional bohoričica (after its inventor Adam Bohorič) and the two innovative proposals by the Peter Dajnko (the dajnčica) and Franc Serafin Metelko (the metelčica).

The Slovene version of Gaj's alphabet differs from the Croatian one in the following traits:

• the Slovene alphabet does not have the characters ⟨ć⟩ and ⟨đ⟩; the sounds these letters represent are not present in the Slovene language;
• in the Slovene variant, the digraphs ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ are treated as two separate letters and represent separate sounds (e.g. the word polje is pronounced /polje/ in Slovene, as opposed to /poʎe/ in Croatian).
• while the phoneme /dʒ/ exists in modern Slovene and is written ⟨dž⟩, it is only used in borrowed words, and ⟨d⟩ and ⟨ž⟩ are considered separate letters, not a digraph.

Slovene orthography is comparatively less phonetic than Serbo-Croatian. For instance, letter ⟨e⟩ can be pronounced in three ways (/e/, /ɛ/ and /ə/), and letter ⟨v⟩ in two (/ʋ/ and /w/). Also, it does not record consonant voicing assimilation: compare e.g. Slovene ⟨odpad⟩ and Serbo-Croatian ⟨otpad⟩ ('junkyard', 'waste').