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Distribution of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet in Serbian books
(by Daniel Bunčić, University of Cologne)

The internet is full of complaints about the decline of the Cyrillic alphabet in Serbian publications (see e.g. Association for the Defence of the Cyrillic alphabet, Serbian Association “Ćirilica”, etc.). However, statistical data to base this on are scarce. At the 21st Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature, and Folklore in Billings, Montana, in 2018, I heard a presentation in which the following diagram from the internet was shown:

Fig. 1: Representation of the Cyrillic alphabet among the holdings of the National Library of Serbia
(originally from vesti-online.com, retrieved on 27 May 2018 but not accessible anymore as of March 2020)

However, it is not clear what the numbers mean: Were 43% of all the books held by the National Library of Serbia in 2012 in Cyrillic, or are 43% of the books published (or acquired?) in 2012 in Cyrillic? Additionally, does this refer to all the books (then the decline would be due to the growing number of books in foreign languages, especially English), or only to the ones written in Serbian? And does this refer to books, journals, newspapers, or all written materials?

Therefore, I decided to investigate this myself. The online catalogue of the National Library of Serbia permits to search without a title or author for media of a certain kind (books, journals, etc.), published in a certain language, in a certain country, and in a certain year. In 2018 one could also search for media printed in a certain alphabet. (As of 2020, this information is unfortunately not included in the catalogue data anymore.)

Between May and November 2018, together with student assistant Caroline Ludwicki, I gathered the necessary data for each year from 1800 to 2018, for all books (no other media) written in Serbian (“srp”), both irrespective of country of publication and separately for Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Fig. 2: Alphabet of Serbian books in absolute numbers

Figure 2 shows the absolute numbers of the books published in Cyrillic and in Latin. One can see how Serbian book publication has increased over time, with the two world wars as the major setbacks. (The slight decrease in the last couple of years is an artefact of the method: Some of the books published in 2016 and 2017 had not yet been acquired by the National Library at the time of our data collection, and some of the books of 2018 had not even been published.)

Figure 2 makes it obvious that right now more Serbian Cyrillic books are being published than ever before in history. The same is true, of course, of the number of Serbian books in the Latin alphabet.

Fig. 3: Percentage of Cyrillic books

In Figure 3, the thick red line shows the same data as Figure 2, but as percentages of the Cyrillic books. The other lines show the Cyrillic percentages for the three main countries where Serbian books are published: Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

One can see that, according to the catalogue data of the National Library of Serbia, Serbian books in the Latin alphabet existed throughout the 19th century, but the vast majority of Serbian books was in Cyrillic. (The lines for the individual countries begin after the last year with a total Serbian book production of zero in the respective country; even thus, the numerical basis at the beginning is small, which explains the high oscillation during the first decades.) The fact that the percentage of Cyrillic books in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Montenegro dropped to (almost) zero during the two world wars is due to anti-Serbian Cyrillic bans declared by Austria-Hungary and the Independent State of Croatia, respectively. However, during the interwar period a clear majority of the Serbian books continued to be printed in Cyrillic letters. It is obvious from Figure 2 that the main drop from numbers around 80–90% to less than 50% of Cyrillic came during Socialist Yugoslavia. During this time, Montenegro was markedly ‘more Cyrillic’ than Serbia, whereas in Bosnia and Herzegovina even of the books marked as ‘Serbian’ by the librarians in Belgrade 80–90% were printed in the Latin alphabet. (This tendency can already be observed in the interwar period.) The breakup of Yugoslavia brings a steep increase for Cyrillic books, and the numbers continue to be considerably higher than before the 1990s, and consistently above 50%. Now the Serbian books printed in Bosnia and Herzegovina have a slightly higher percentage of Cyrillic, whereas in Montenegro the percentage of Cyrillic books has markedly decreased to between 30% and 40%.

All these data of course depend on the librarians’ categorization of the books, especially with respect to language. The database does not seem to have a label ‘Montenegrin’, so that all ‘Montenegrin’ books had to be classified as ‘Serbian’. However, it is not so clear what the decisions about books from Bosnia and Herzegovina were based on. It is quite possible that a Bosnian Serb book written in the Latin alphabet would have a greater chance to be classified as ‘Bosnian’ (“bosanski”!) or ‘Croatian’ than a book written in the Cyrillic alphabet, so that the relatively high percentage of Cyrillic for Serbian books from Bosnia and Herzegovina since the 1990s might also be an artefact.

The following Table 1 indicates the basis of Figures 2 and 3 in numbers. Note that the numbers for the three countries do not always add up to the number for all countries. This is in part due to the fact that some books in the Serbian language are also printed in other countries (Croatia, USA, Germany, etc.). For some years, the sum of the numbers for the three countries is even lower than the number for all countries, which is probably due to the fact that some publishing companies are based in more than one country, and some books are jointly published by two or more publishers, so that the same book can be counted for several countries.

Brühl, 27 March 2020