It was adopted on 9 June 2009 by the Montenegrin Minister of Education, Sreten Škuletić[1] and replaced the Serbian Cyrillic and Gaj's Latin alphabets in use at the time.
It uses most letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, with the exception of Q, W, X and Y, only used for writing common words or proper names directly borrowed from foreign languages.
It also uses some Latin extended letters, composed with a basic Latin letter and one of two combining accents (the acute accent or caron, over C, S, and Z), and a supplementary base consonant Đ: they are needed to note additional phonetic distinctions (notably to preserve the distinctions that are present in the Cyrillic script with which the Montenegrin language has also long been written, when it was still unified in the former Yugoslavia within the written Serbo-Croatian language).
The alphabet also includes some digraphs built from the previous characters (that are considered as single letters for collation purpose): Dž, Nj, and Lj.
Its first version was developed by Vojislav Nikčević in the 1970s who was a dissident of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and considered Montenegrin speech to be unique and deserving of consideration as a separate language from Serbo-Croatian.