The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is a variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language, adapted in 1818 by the Serbian philologist and linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write modern standard Serbian, the other being Latin alphabet (abeceda).
Cyrillic alphabet – azbuka
Cyrillic script – ćirilica
Karadžić based his alphabet on the previous Slavonic-Serbian script, following the principle of “write as you speak and read as it is written”, removing obsolete letters.
Medieval Serbian Cyrillic
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić fled Serbia during the Serbian Revolution in 1813, to Vienna. There he met Jernej Kopitar, a linguist with interest in slavistics. Kopitar and Sava Mrkalj helped Vuk to reform Serbian and its orthography. He finalized the alphabet in 1818 with the Serbian Dictionary.
Karadžić reformed standard Serbian and standardised the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles on the Johann Christoph Adelung’ model and Jan Hus’ Czech alphabet. Karadžić’s reforms of standard Serbian modernised it and distanced it from Serbian and Russian Church Slavonic, instead bringing it closer to common folk speech, specifically, to the dialect of Eastern Herzegovina which he spoke. Karadžić was, together with Đuro Daničić, the main Serbian signatory to the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850 which, encouraged by Austrian authorities, laid the foundation for Serbian, various forms of which are used by Serbs in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia today. Karadžić also translated the New Testament into Serbian, which was published in 1868.
Differences from other Cyrillic alphabets
Serbian Cyrillic does not use several letters encountered in other Slavic Cyrillic alphabets. It does not use hard sign (ъ) and soft sign (ь), but the aforementioned soft-sign ligatures instead. It does not have Russian/Belarusian Э, Ukrainian/Belarusian І, the semi-vowels Й or Ў, nor the iotated letters Я (Russian/Bulgarian ya), Є (Ukrainian ye), Ї (yi), Ё (Russian yo) or Ю (yu), which are instead written as two separate letters: Ја, Је, Ји, Јо, Ју. Ј can also be used as a semi-vowel, in place of й. The letter Щ is not used. When necessary, it is transliterated as either ШЧ, ШЋ or ШТ.
In other words, Serbian alphabet is modernised and as a result simpler. We only have the letter/sound “j”, everything else can be added to form the sound that is needed.