Typing Croatian Diacritics

Knowing that Croatian needs č, ć, š, ž, đ is one thing; actually producing them on your phone or laptop is another. This page is the practical companion to the alphabet pages: where the diacritic letters live on a Croatian keyboard, how to type them on a layout that does not have them, the ASCII fallbacks people use in casual chat (and why some are ambiguous), and the one capitalisation rule for digraphs that learners get wrong over and over.

The Croatian keyboard is QWERTZ

The standard Croatian computer layout is QWERTZ, not QWERTY — the Z and Y are swapped relative to the English keyboard, because Z is far more frequent in Croatian than Y (which barely exists). More importantly, the five diacritic letters get their own dedicated keys, clustered where an English keyboard keeps its punctuation:

So on a real Croatian keyboard you simply press one key for each — š, đ, č, ć, ž are not "special characters" you have to hunt for; they are home-row-adjacent letters like any other. The digraphs dž, lj, nj are typed as their two component keys (d+ž, l+j, n+j); there is no single dž/lj/nj key, because they are spelled with two characters even though they count as one letter.

Typing them without a Croatian keyboard

Most learners do not have a Croatian keyboard. Here are the reliable options:

• Phones (iOS/Android): add Croatian as a keyboard language in settings, or just long-press the base letter on your existing keyboard. Long-press c and you get č, ć; long-press s → š; z → ž; d → đ. This is the fastest route for most people and needs no setup beyond the long-press.
• Windows: add the Croatian input language, then switch with Alt+Shift (or Win+Space). Or use the international layout and dead keys.
• macOS: add the Croatian input source in Keyboard → Input Sources, then switch with Ctrl+Space or the menu-bar flag. Alternatively, the ABC – Extended layout gives you carons via a dead key (the caron dead key, then the base letter).
• Linux: add the Croatian layout in your input settings, or use the Compose key (e.g. Compose + c + < gives č in many setups).

ASCII fallbacks and why they're ambiguous

Before Unicode was universal — and still today in URLs, old databases, hasty texting, and gamertags — people approximate the diacritics with plain ASCII. You will encounter several conventions, and you should be able to read them even though you should not write them in anything careful:

Two of these fallbacks are not just ugly but structurally ambiguous, and that is the real reason to avoid them:

1. "dj" for đ. The string dj can mean the single letter đ (rodjendan for rođendan) or a genuine d + j across a morpheme boundary (odjel "department", nadjačati "to overpower"). A reader — or a search engine, or a sorting algorithm — cannot always tell which you meant. Writing the real character đ removes the ambiguity instantly: rođendan is unmistakably đ, while odjel is unmistakably d+j.

2. "dz" for dž. The string dz can mean the digraph dž or a real d + z sequence (which exists across boundaries). Again, the real character resolves it.

The carons (č, š, ž) are less dangerous to drop because context usually rescues them, but the č/ć fallback does lose information: written as plain "c," kuca could be kuća (house) or kuca (it knocks/beats) — two different words.

When fallbacks are acceptable — and when they aren't

The standard is simple: in formal writing the proper diacritics are obligatory. A school essay, a job application, a business email, a published article, a sign — all require č, ć, š, ž, đ. Writing cevapcici for ćevapčići in any of those contexts is a spelling error.

The fallbacks survive only in genuinely informal or constrained contexts: a quick SMS to a friend, a username, a URL slug, a hashtag, a system that cannot render the characters. Even there, many Croatians do type the proper diacritics now that phones make it easy. Treat the ASCII spellings as something you must recognise, not something to imitate.

Capitals and the digraph title-case rule

Each diacritic letter has an uppercase form: Č, Ć, Š, Ž, Đ. The stroke or caron stays on the capital.

The rule learners constantly get wrong concerns the digraphs Dž, Lj, Nj. When a word that begins with a digraph is capitalised at the start of a sentence or as a proper name, only the first character is capitalised, not both:

The exception is all-caps, where the whole word is uppercase (headlines, signs, acronyms). There, both characters of the digraph are capital: NJEGOV, LJUBAV, DŽEMPER. So there are three forms in total — lowercase njegov, title-case Njegov, all-caps NJEGOV — but never the mixed NJegov.

The capitalisation of the rest of the language — proper nouns, titles, the polite Vi — is covered on the capitalisation page.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• The standard layout is QWERTZ, with dedicated keys for š, đ, č, ć, ž; the digraphs are typed as two keystrokes.
• Without a Croatian keyboard, long-press the base letter on a phone, or add the Croatian input source on Windows/macOS/Linux.
• ASCII fallbacks (c, cc, sx, dj, dz) are for recognition only; "dj" for đ and "dz" for dž are genuinely ambiguous with real d+j / d+z sequences.
• In formal writing the diacritics are obligatory; the fallbacks belong to SMS, usernames, and URLs.
• For a capitalised digraph, capitalise only the first character — Njegov, not NJegov — except in all-caps (NJEGOV).