Editing Spelling reform (section)

===South Slavic languages===
{{See also|Differences between standard Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian}}

Within the South Slavic languages, which form a dialect continuum, the [[Serbo-Croatian]] language itself consists of four literary standards: '''Serbian''', '''Croatian''', '''Bosnian''' and '''Montenegrin'''. It went through a series of major spelling reforms in the early to middle 19th century. Before then, two distinct writing traditions had evolved. Western dialects had been written using the Latin alphabet, while eastern (Serbian) had been using an archaic form of the [[Cyrillic script]]. Despite many attempts, there was no universally agreed-upon spelling standard employing the Latin alphabet, and the Cyrillic version was considered outdated.

A series of reforms have been undertaken to set the standards, in order to bring the writing system to parity with spoken language. The reform movement was spearheaded by Croatian linguist [[Ljudevit Gaj]] for the Latin-based writing system, and Serbian reformer [[Vuk Stefanović Karadžić]] for the Cyrillic version.

The reform efforts were coordinated in order to correlate the two writing systems, culminating in the [[Vienna Literary Agreement]] which has remained in service since. The Slovene language, not part of the Serbo-Croatian dialect continuum, was also covered by the same reform movement. After World War II and the codification of literary [[Macedonian language|Macedonian]], the same system has been extended with some modifications.

All of these writing systems exhibit a high degree of correspondence between language sounds and letters, making them highly phonetic and very consistent.