Credited to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serbian and Croatian scholars dispute the script's ethnic attribution. The Croatian Encyclopedia treats it as western or Croatian Cyrillic used in Bosnia, Dubrovnik and central Dalmatia, and its early monuments come from both Bosnia and Dalmatia. The name bosančica itself dates only from the late nineteenth century.
How it began
Bosančica is a variant of Cyrillic that formed gradually in medieval Bosnia and neighboring Dalmatia. The Croatian Encyclopedia traces its shaping through inscriptions and manuscripts from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, beginning in Bosnia with the Humac tablet (eleventh century) and the charter of Ban Kulin (1189). It rests directly on the cursive chancery Cyrillic of Bosnia and Hum in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The name was coined at the end of the nineteenth century by Ćiro Truhelka.
How it works
The script is a Cyrillic minuscule with firm, sharp strokes and strongly marked verticals. Its letter shapes differ so much from other cursive Cyrillic that it looks like a separate script, and it contains letters not found elsewhere in Cyrillic. Each letter stands for one sound. It uses far fewer marks above the letters than standard Cyrillic, and both its letters and its number system show the influence of Glagolitic. A typical letter is djerv, used for two related consonants.
How it spread
In Bosnia it was used by Franciscan writers such as Matija Divković and by Muslims, who called it begovica. It was also used in Dubrovnik for diplomatic documents and a lectionary of the early sixteenth century, and in central Dalmatia for the Poljica Statute of 1440. Croatian nobles and Glagolitic clergy wrote private letters in it.
Where it stands today
The script was used for religious, legal and literary texts until Latin script replaced it, a shift that began in the late eighteenth century, and it went out of use in the nineteenth. It is now a subject of study and of dispute between national scholarly traditions, and recent cultural projects have tried to revive interest in it.
