The pre-Vuk era origins of Vuk Karadzic’s alphabet reform

Abstract

As explained earlier by Vladimir Mosin, the absence of language standard (i.e. state office) always entails certain disintegrative occurrences in a literacy. A disintegrative impact invariably represents a resurfacing of the original linguistic structure. The dissolution of an old standard is as a rule associated with a foreign standard, which can be accounted for as an interaction between different writing systems, which is especially pronounced in bordering or peripheral area of a certain literacy. Graphic solutions created as a result of such interaction could eventually evolve into a new graphic standard in a given linguistic structure. All this has taken place in the course of formation of the contemporary Serbian Cyrillic script, which in essence represents the final evolutionary phase of the process herein described.