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Ljudevit Gaj

Ljudevit Gaj (August 8, 1809, Krapina – April 20, 1872, Zagreb) was a Croatian linguist, politician, journalist and writer. He was the central person of the Croatian national reformation or the Illyrian Movement. He was of French descent.

In 1830 in Buda he printed the book Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ("Brief Basics of the Croatian-Slavonic Orthography"), which was the first common Croatian orthography book (after the works of Ignjat Đurđević and Pavao Ritter Vitezović). The book was printed bilingually, in Croatian and German. The Croatians used the Latin alphabet, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented. Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and the Czech orthography, using one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. He used diacritics and the digraphs lj and nj.

The book helped Gaj become famous throughout the country. Suddenly he became the leader of young talented intellectuals, led by the same ideas about the Croatian language and people. When in 1834 he succeeded where fifteen years ago Đuro Matija Šporer hadn't - to get the agreement from the royal government of Habsburg Monarchy to make a Croatian daily newspaper - he was already seen as the leader. Finally, on January 6th 1835, Novine Horvatske ("The Croatian News") appeared, and on January 10th, it got the literary addition Danica Horvatska, Slavonska i Dalmatinska ("The Croatian, Slavonian, and Dalmatian Daystar"). It was a big progress in realising the idea of marking the Croatian literature as unique. The "Novine Horvatske" were printed in Kajkavian dialect until the end of that year, while "Danica" was printed in Shtokavian dialect along with Kajkavian.

In early 1836 the publications' names were changed to Ilirske narodne novine ("The Illyrian People's News") and Danica ilirska ("The Illyrian Morning Star") respectively. This was a step further in realising Gaj's idea that the people of the southern parts of Habsburg Monarchy are Illyrians, like the present-day Albanians; in reality, and contrary to Gaj's theory, they were ethnically Slavic.

Beside the political ideologist, organizer and the leader of the reformation, Ljudevit Gaj was a writer too. The most popular poem of that time was Još Horvatska ni propala ("Croatia isn't ruined yet"), written in 1833.

The modern Croatian alphabet is credited to Gaj's Kratka osnova. The alphabet was also named gajica or Croatian gajica after him.