Montenegrin alphabet

The Montenegrin alphabet is the collective name given to "Abeceda" (Montenegrin Latin alphabet) and "Азбука" (Montenegrin Cyrillic alphabet), the writing systems used to write the Montenegrin language. It was adopted on 9 June 2009 by the Montenegrin Minister of Education, Sreten Škuletić and replaced the Serbian Cyrillic and Gaj's Latin alphabets in use at the time. Although the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets enjoy equal status under the Constitution of Montenegro, the government and proponents of the Montenegrin language prefer to use the Latin script; it is also much more widely used in all aspects of the day-to-day written communication in the country, in education, advertising and media. Efforts to create a Latin character-based Montenegrin alphabet go back to at least World War I, when a newspaper was published in Cetinje using both Latin and Cyrillic characters. The Montenegrin Latin alphabet (Montenegrin: crnogorska latinica / црногорска латиница, crnogorska abeceda / црногорска абецеда or crnogorski alfabet / црногорски алфабет) is used for writing the Montenegrin language in Latin script. Abeceda: A B C Č Ć D Dž Đ E F G H I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S Š Ś T U V Z Ž Ź It uses most letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, with the exception of Q, W, X and Y, only used for writing common words or proper names directly borrowed from foreign languages. Montenegrin Latin is based on Gaj's Latin alphabet, with the addition of the two letters Ś and Ź, to replace the pairs SJ and ZJ (so anachronistically considered as digraphs). С́ and З́, and could also be represented in the original alphabets as sj and zj, and сj and зj, respectively. Because these two glyphs already exist in the Polish alphabet, but must be created in Cyrillic by using combining characters, it provides an additional incentive to prefer Latin over Cyrillic.