During the same period, linguists led by Ljudevit Gaj adapted the Latin alphabet, in use in western South Slavic areas, using the same principles.

The updated Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was officially adopted in the Principality of Serbia in 1868, and was in exclusive use in the country up to the interwar period.

Due to the shared cultural area, Gaj's Latin alphabet saw a gradual adoption in the Socialist Republic of Serbia since, and both scripts are used to write modern standard Serbian.

Glagolitic alphabet appears to be older, predating the introduction of Christianity, only formalized by Cyril and expanded to cover non-Greek sounds.

It's notable extensive use of diacritical signs by the Resava dialect and use of the djerv (Ꙉꙉ) for the Serbian reflexes of Pre-Slavic *tj and *dj (*t͡ɕ, *d͡ʑ, *d͡ʒ, and *tɕ), later the letter evolved to dje (Ђђ) and tshe (Ћћ) letters.

Karadžić was, together with Đuro Daničić, the main Serbian signatory to the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850 which, encouraged by Austrian authorities, laid the foundation for Serbian, various forms of which are used by Serbs in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia today.

He wrote several books; Mala prostonarodna slaveno-serbska pesnarica and Pismenica serbskoga jezika in 1814, and two more in 1815 and 1818, all with the alphabet still in progress.

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian Cyrillic is no longer used in Croatia on national level, while in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro it remained an official script.

It does not have Russian/Belarusian Э, Ukrainian/Belarusian І, the semi-vowels Й or Ў, nor the iotated letters Я (Russian/Bulgarian ya), Є (Ukrainian ye), Ї (yi), Ё (Russian yo) or Ю (yu), which are instead written as two separate letters: Ја, Је, Ји, Јо, Ју.

The regular (upright) shapes are generally standardized among languages and there are no officially recognized variations.

[19][20] That presents a challenge in Unicode modeling, as the glyphs differ only in italic versions, and historically non-italic letters have been used in the same code positions.

If the underlying font and Web technology provides support, the proper glyphs can be obtained by marking the text with appropriate language codes.

Thus, in non-italic mode: whereas: Since Unicode unifies different glyphs in same characters,[22] font support must be present to display the correct variant.