Vuk Stefanović Karadić

As one of the leading European philologists of his time, Karadić reformed the Serbian literary language and standardized the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles on the German model. Karadić's reforms of the Serbian literary language modernized it and distanced it from Serbian and Russian Church Slavonic, instead bringing it closer to common folk speech, specifically, to the dialect of Eastern Herzegovina which he spoke.