Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian Latin Characters Cheatsheet

Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian written in Latin script share one alphabet, gajica, designed so that every letter maps to exactly one sound. It adds five characters to the basic Latin set: č, ć, đ, š and ž. Three digraphs — dž, lj and nj — also count as single letters and have their own dictionary positions, even though they are typed as two keystrokes.

The distinction between č and ć is the one that separates fluent writers from careless ones, and it is not decorative. Č is a harder sound, roughly the ch of church; ć is softer and more palatal, with no close English equivalent. The two appear in different words and, crucially, in different surname endings. The -ić ending that ends so many surnames in the region takes ć, so Petrović, Marković and Đoković are all ć, and writing Petrovič is a recognisable error. Meanwhile words like čovjek and čaj take č.

The letter đ causes its own trouble. It is a crossed d, a single letter, and is often written as dj when the character is unavailable — so Đoković appears as Djokovic in the international press. That is a transliteration, not a spelling, and it means the correct form will not match the common one in a database. The same applies to the capital Đ, which is easily confused with the Icelandic eth Ð and the African D-with-stroke; they look nearly identical but are different Unicode characters and will not match each other.

Serbian is the interesting case because it is genuinely digraphic: the same language is written in both Cyrillic and this Latin alphabet, with a strict one-to-one mapping between them, so any Serbian text can be converted between scripts mechanically without loss. Croatian and Bosnian use Latin only. If you are working with Serbian data, expect both scripts and expect users to search in either.

On Windows, use the Croatian or Serbian Latin layout, which puts č, ć, š, ž and đ on the keys to the right of the letters where the punctuation normally sits. Alt codes exist in the Central European codepage — š is Alt+0154, ž is Alt+0158, č is Alt+0232, ć is Alt+0230 and đ is Alt+0240 — but they depend on the active codepage and are unreliable across applications. On macOS, select the Croatian input source, or hold the base letter for the accent picker. On Linux, Compose then v then the letter gives the caron forms, and Compose then / then d gives đ.