Symbols
75Click a symbol to copy it and open its page.
Croatian alphabet: A to Lj
Č and Ć follow C, Dž and Đ follow D, Lj follows L: each is a letter of its own. Dž, Lj and Nj are normally typed as two letters (D+ž, L+j, N+j); the single-character forms shown are Unicode's compatibility letters, with a separate title-case form.
Croatian alphabet: M to Ž
Nj follows N, Š follows S and Ž closes the alphabet. Q, W, X and Y are not Croatian letters; they appear only in foreign names.
Croatian punctuation
Quotations open low and close high: „like this”, also printed „like this“. Books often use » « pointing inwards.
Currency
Croatia has used the euro since 1 January 2023 (before that the kuna, kn). The sign goes after the amount: 12,50 €. Bosnia and Herzegovina's convertible mark has no Unicode sign and is written KM.
Where Croatian is spoken
Largest first. Croatian is the official language of Croatia and one of three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and an official language of the EU.
From Croatian
The cravat, and so the necktie, is named after the Croats (Hrvati).
On the map
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The 30 letters of the Croatian alphabet
The Croatian alphabet (abeceda) runs A B C Č Ć D Dž Đ E F G H I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S Š T U V Z Ž. It is Gaj's Latin alphabet, named after Ljudevit Gaj, who shaped it in the 1830s, and it is the same 30-letter set used by Bosnian and Serbian in their Latin forms; standard Montenegrin adds Ś and Ź. Each letter stands for one sound and each sound has one letter, so Croatian spelling is highly phonemic, though ordinary text does not mark word stress: Zagreb, Split, Šibenik, Čakovec, Makarska.
Č, Ć, Đ, Š and Ž are letters in their own right, not C, D, S and Z with decoration. They have their own places in the alphabet and in dictionaries: Č and Ć come right after C, Dž and then Đ after D, Š after S, and Ž closes the alphabet, so čaj is looked up after every word that begins with plain c. Leaving the marks off changes words: šuma is a forest but suma a sum, žar is embers but zar a question word.
Q, W, X and Y are not Croatian letters. They appear in foreign names and unadapted foreign words; adapted loans are respelled the Croatian way, so a taxi is taksi, a weekend vikend and a jeep džip, while foreign names keep their own spelling: Croatian writes Shakespeare and reads it Šekspir.
Croatian letters pronunciation: Č, Ć, Dž, Đ, Lj, Nj, Š, Ž
Š š is the sh of "ship" (što, what; šuma, forest) and Ž ž the s of "measure" (žena, woman; žut, yellow). Č č is a hard ch, said with the tongue drawn back, as in čovjek (man) and čaša (glass), while Ć ć is a softer ch with the tongue forward, close to the t of British "tune": kuća (house), noć (night), sreća (luck, happiness) and the many surnames in -ić, such as Modrić and Perišić.
Dž dž and Đ đ are the voiced partners of that pair, both near the j of "jam": Dž is the harder one, as in džep (pocket) and džem (jam), and Đ the softer one, as in rođendan (birthday), đak (pupil) and the town of Đakovo. In many parts of Croatia the two pairs sound almost alike in everyday speech, but the spelling always keeps them apart, so a word has to be learned with its letter.
Lj lj and Nj nj are the soft l and n heard in Italian figlio and Spanish año: ljubav (love), ljeto (summer), konj (horse), Njemačka (Germany). Among the plain letters, C c is always ts (cesta, road), J j is the y of "yes" (jaje, egg), H h is a breathy kh (hvala, thanks), and R can carry a syllable by itself, which is why trg (square), vrt (garden) and Krk need no vowel.
Croatian accents on letters, and the ones you never write
When people say "Croatian accents" in writing, they usually mean the marks on Č, Ć, Š and Ž and the bar through Đ. The caron (kvačica, little hook) on č š ž was taken from Czech, and the acute on ć from Polish ć; Daničić's đ, introduced in 1878, was modeled on a letter from the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon alphabets. These are the only marks normal Croatian text uses.
Croatian speech also has a pitch accent, rising or falling and long or short, but ordinary spelling never shows it. Dictionaries, grammars and language textbooks mark it with four signs, the double grave ȁ, the inverted breve ȃ, the grave à and the acute á, so a dictionary entry may print a vowel as ȁ or ȃ where ordinary text has a plain a. Do not copy those vowels into a message, a name or a document; nobody writes them outside linguistics.
Dž, Lj and Nj: one letter written with two
Dž, Lj and Nj each count as one letter in the alphabet and in dictionary order, but they are typed as two ordinary letters. A word that starts with one is capitalised on the first letter only, Džamija, Ljubljana, Njemačka, and both letters go up in all capitals: LJUBAV, NJEMAČKA. In crosswords and word games each takes a single square.
Not every dž, lj or nj is one of these letters. Where the two meet across the parts of a word they stay separate sounds: nadživjeti (to outlive) is nad živjeti, and injekcija (injection) has n and j said one after the other.
Unicode does have single characters for all three, each in three forms: DŽ dž Dž, LJ lj Lj and NJ nj Nj, the last of each being a title-case form for a capitalised word. They were encoded so that Serbian Cyrillic Џ, Љ and Њ could be converted letter for letter into Latin. They are included for completeness; Croatian orthography writes each as a two-letter digraph.
How to type Croatian letters on a keyboard and phone
The easiest way is the Croatian keyboard layout, built into Windows and macOS. It is a QWERTZ layout: Š and Đ sit to the right of P, Č and Ć to the right of L, and Ž next to Ć. Symbols move too: on the Croatian layout @ is AltGrV, and Z and Y swap places. On iPhone and Android, add the Croatian keyboard, which has keys for all five letters, or long-press c for č and ć, s for š and z for ž. To paste a letter right now, click it in the grid.
Without that layout, the Windows Alt codes on the number pad cover only four of them on an English system: Š Alt0138, š Alt0154, Ž Alt0142, ž Alt0158. In Microsoft Word, type the code and press AltX straight after it: 010C/010D for Č č, 0106/0107 for Ć ć, 0110/0111 for Đ đ, 0160/0161 for Š š and 017D/017E for Ž ž. On a Mac with an English layout, press and hold c, s or z and pick the letter from the accent menu.
In HTML, write Č č, Ć ć, Đ đ, Š š and Ž ž. In LaTeX, \v{c}, \'{c}, \v{s} and \v{z} give č ć š ž, and \dj and \DJ give đ and Đ with the T1 font encoding. One look-alike to watch: capital Đ looks exactly like the Icelandic eth Ð , but the small forms differ, đ against ð, so copy Đ from this page.
When no keyboard helps, people fall back on plain letters, c for č and ć, s for š, z for ž and dj for đ, which is how Croatian names end up as Modric or Djakovo abroad. That is fine in a quick chat, but wrong in names, addresses, documents and anything printed.
Croatian quotation marks, money and where Croatian is spoken
Croatian opens a quotation low and closes it high: „Dobar dan”, rekla je. Typesetters close it with ” or “, and both are seen in print; books also use angle quotes pointing inwards, »like this«. A quotation inside a quotation takes the single marks ‚ ’ or ‘ ’, and the curly ’ doubles as the apostrophe.
Croatia has paid in euros since 1 January 2023, when the replaced the kuna (kn). Croatian puts the sign after the amount, with a decimal comma and a full stop for thousands: 12,50 and 1.250,00 . In Bosnia and Herzegovina prices are in convertible marks, written KM, as in 20 KM.
Croatian has an estimated 6.8 million speakers by CLDR's count, about 4.1 million of them in Croatia , where it is the official language, and around half a million in Bosnia and Herzegovina , where it is one of three official languages. It became an official language of the European Union when Croatia joined in 2013, and it has recognised minority status in Serbia's Vojvodina, in Austria's Burgenland, in Hungary and in Italy's Molise. CLDR also counts about 1.3 million speakers in Slovenia and about 660,000 in Germany, and large communities live in Canada, the United States, Australia and Argentina.
Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin understand one another without effort. Croatian keeps the ijekavian forms (mlijeko, milk; rijeka, river) and has many words of its own: kruh (bread), tisuća (thousand), vlak (train), kava (coffee), and Slavic month names such as siječanj (January) and listopad (October). See the Bosnian, Serbian and Slovenian collections for their letters, and the Croatia collection for the flag, food and other emoji of the country.
How to use them
6 situationsClick to copyCroatian Alphabet & Letters combos
14Worth knowing
- The word cravat comes from Hrvat, a Croat: in the 17th century Croatian soldiers in France wore knotted neck scarves that Parisians copied and named after them. Croatia marks Cravat Day on 18 October.
- Đ was introduced in 1878 by the linguist Đuro Daničić, whose own first name is spelled with it; before that the sound was written dj or gj, the spelling that survives abroad in names like Djakovo.
- Before Latin letters took over, Croatian was long written in Glagolitic, the oldest Slavic alphabet; the Baška tablet from around 1100 on the island of Krk is one of its best-known monuments, and Croatia's 1, 2 and 5 euro cent coins carry the Glagolitic letters for HR.
- Croatian dialects are named after their word for "what": Štokavian (što), on which the standard is based, Kajkavian (kaj) around Zagreb, and Čakavian (ča) along the coast and on the islands.
- Croatian has its own Slavic month names instead of January, February and so on: siječanj, veljača, ožujak … studeni, prosinac, most of them taken from nature and farm work.
Questions people ask
8How many letters are in the Croatian alphabet?
30: A B C Č Ć D Dž Đ E F G H I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S Š T U V Z Ž. Dž, Lj and Nj are written with two characters but count as one letter each; Q, W, X and Y are not in the alphabet.
How do you type č on Windows?
Add the Croatian keyboard in Settings > Time & language > Language & region; č is then the key right of L, with ć next to it. Without it, copy č from this page, or in Word type 010D (small) or 010C (capital) and press AltX.
How do you type ć on a Mac?
Add the Croatian layout in System Settings > Keyboard > Input Sources; ć is immediately to the right of Č. On an English layout, press and hold c and choose ć from the menu, or copy it from the grid.
How do I type đ?
On the Croatian keyboard, đ is the key right of Š. On a phone, add the Croatian keyboard, which has a đ key. In Word, type 0111 (small) or 0110 (capital) and press AltX, or copy Đ đ from this page.
What is the difference between č and ć in Croatian?
Both sound like English ch. Č is harder, with the tongue pulled back (čaj, tea); ć is softer, with the tongue forward (kuća, house, and surnames ending in -ić). They are different letters and the spelling of each word fixes which one it takes.
What quotation marks does Croatian use?
The opening mark is low and the closing one high: „like this” (often printed as „like this“). Books also use »like this«, and quotes within quotes take ‚ ’.
Is Croatian written in Cyrillic?
No. Croatian is written only in the Latin alphabet. Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin, and historically Croatian was also written in Glagolitic and in a local form of Cyrillic called bosančica.
Where is the @ on a Croatian keyboard?
On the Croatian layout, press AltGrV (Right AltV) for @. The same layout puts Z where English keyboards have Y.
