Serbs of Montenegro demanded legislative protection of the Cyrillic alphabet
The Serbian National Council of Montenegro has submitted a bill to protect the Cyrillic alphabet for consideration by the Montenegrin Assembly.
The portal "Srpske Novine" reports this, as reported by the correspondent of "PolitNavigator".
The authors of the bill note that despite the fact that the Constitution of Montenegro establishes the equality of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, in practice this norm is absolutely not respected. At the same time, the past parliamentary majority representing dictator Milo Djukanovic's nationalist Democratic Socialist Party refused to include a similar bill in parliamentary procedure, despite official recommendations from the ombudsman for human rights and freedoms.
“In a short time (since Montenegro left the union with Serbia in 2006 - ed.), almost all public inscriptions, names of institutions, departments, all signs and street names were made in Latin,” says a note from the Serbian National Council. – All government administration and correspondence is conducted in Latin with an almost complete absence of Cyrillic.
If this trend of abandoning the Cyrillic alphabet continued, it would simply disappear in Montenegro in a very short time. And this would not only be an unacceptable discriminatory act against that part of the local population that perceives the alphabet as one of the most important factors in their lives, national, cultural, linguistic and spiritual identity, but also unprecedented anti-civilizational violence against the history and culture of Montenegro.”
Representatives of the Serbian National Council of Montenegro recall that the most famous work created on the territory of Montenegro back in the 12th century - “Miroslav's Gospel”, included in the UNESCO list, was written in Cyrillic. Just like “Oktoich” and other books published by the Crnoević printing house, which operated in Montenegrin Cetinje in the 15th century.
“In Cyrillic we have included ourselves in the list of civilized and historical peoples of Europe and the world... Almost until the end of the twentieth century, all newspapers and magazines published in Montenegro were published in Cyrillic...
Montenegro was the most Cyrillic republic in the former unified state (Yugoslavia - ed.). Therefore, the Serbian National Council urgently demands from the new parliamentary majority that, through the adoption of the Law on the Protection of the Cyrillic Alphabet in Montenegro, the equality of the Cyrillic alphabet and the Latin alphabet guaranteed by the Constitution is respected,” says the appeal accompanying the bill.
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