The Croatian Alphabet (Gajica)

Croatian is written in the Latin alphabet — the same script you are reading right now — not in Cyrillic. This is the first thing to fix in your mental map, because Croatian sits next to Serbian on the language family tree, and Serbian is regularly written in Cyrillic. Croatian is not. Every street sign, newspaper, text message, and book in Croatia uses Latin letters, decorated with a small set of diacritics. Learn those thirty letters and their sounds, and you can read aloud — accurately — almost any Croatian word you have never seen before. That is a promise English can never make.

What "gajica" means

The Croatian alphabet is called gajica (the Gaj alphabet), after Ljudevit Gaj, the 19th-century reformer who standardised it in the 1830s. Gaj's great idea was borrowed from Czech: instead of spelling a single sound with clusters of letters (the way English writes one sh sound as sh, ti, ci, ssi…), give each distinct sound its own letter, adding small marks — a háček (the little "v" hat) or an acute accent — when the Latin alphabet runs out of letters.

The result is a writing system that is very nearly phonemic: one letter, one sound; one sound, one letter. This is the single most important fact on this page.

The 30 letters in order

Here is the full alphabet in its official dictionary order. Read across each row.

That is 30 letters: 22 plain Latin letters (minus a few you will not find — see below), plus the three digraphs dž, lj, nj, plus the five diacritic letters č, ć, đ, š, ž.

The diacritic letters are real letters

The five letters wearing marks — č, ć, đ, š, ž — are not "decorated" versions of plain letters that you can ignore in a hurry. They are independent letters with their own place in the alphabet and their own sounds. Writing c where the word needs č is exactly as wrong as writing t where it needs d: it spells a different word, or no word at all.

The marks themselves come in two shapes: the caron (háček, the little wedge) sits on č, š, ž (and on the d of dž), and the acute accent appears on ć. The letter đ is a d with a horizontal stroke through its ascender. These are covered in detail on their own pages — see č versus ć and dž versus đ.

The three digraphs count as single letters

Three of the thirty letters are written with two keystrokes but behave as one letter: dž, lj, nj. Each spells a single sound, and each occupies a single slot in the alphabet.

Because they are single letters, they affect alphabetical order. In a Croatian dictionary, every word beginning with lj comes after all plain l-words, not interleaved among them — so ljubav (love) is filed after lopta (ball), even though L-O sorts after L-J in the English ABC. Likewise, words in nj follow all n-words, and dž-words follow all d-words and dz sequences. There is a full discussion on the digraphs page.

The missing letters: q, w, x, y

Four letters of the English alphabet do not belong to gajica: q, w, x, y. Croatian simply has no native words that need them.

• The sound English spells with x is written ks: taksi (taxi), boks (boxing).
• The sound English spells with qu is written kv: kvaliteta (quality), kvart (a city district).
• The "w" sound, where it occurs in loans, is usually rendered v.

You will still see q, w, x, y — in untranslated foreign names and brands: New York, taxi on an imported sign, William, Wi-Fi, quiz (often respelled kviz). But they are guests, not citizens.

Why phonemic spelling changes how you learn

In English, spelling and sound have drifted so far apart that you must memorise the look of each word separately — though, through, tough, thought share four letters and four different pronunciations. Croatian does not work like this. There are a handful of complications (the ije/je alternation from the old yat vowel, and the fact that some speakers no longer hear the č/ć difference they must still write), but the baseline rule holds with remarkable consistency: say what you see, spell what you hear.

This has a practical payoff. From your very first week you can:

• Read new vocabulary aloud correctly without a pronunciation guide.
• Write down a word a Croatian speaks to you and have a real chance of spelling it right.
• Trust that double letters are genuinely two sounds — najjači (strongest) really has two j sounds, and you pronounce both.

Common mistakes

English speakers treat č, ć, š, ž, đ as optional accents to be dropped when in a hurry. They are full letters; omitting them creates a misspelling, and often a different word: cesta (road) is not česta (frequent, f.).

Do not interleave digraph words among the single-letter words. Lj, nj, and dž each form a separate block that comes after the whole base-letter run.

In careful Croatian, adapt foreign spellings to native letters: taxi → taksi, quiz → kviz. The original spelling survives only for proper names.

Key takeaways

• Croatian uses the Latin alphabet (gajica), never Cyrillic.
• There are 30 letters: 22 plain Latin letters, the 5 diacritic letters č, ć, đ, š, ž, and the 3 digraphs dž, lj, nj.
• q, w, x, y are not part of it — they appear only in foreign names; native equivalents are ks, kv, v.
• The digraphs dž, lj, nj are single letters: one sound each, and they form their own blocks in alphabetical order.
• Spelling is phonemic: master the 30 sound values and you can read and write almost any word — a head start English never offers.