Jovan Subotić (1817-1886), a doctor of law and a barrister, was one of the most distinguished Serbs of the 19th century: famous in his own time as a man of letters, cultural worker and politician, he also wrote philological works. It is important to remark that Subotić was a member of the Matica srpska committee for the language and orthography, that he published papers on scriptural and orthographical issues, that he resigned from the editor s position in the Cepбckiŭ Лҍmonucб because of the Matica srpska s refusal to print articles written in Vuk s alphabet, and that as a censor for Serbian books in Pest he enormously contributed to the publication of Daničić s polemical work The War for the Serbian Language and Orthography (1847). Subotić s contribution to the development of the Serbian literary language has been underestimated in Serbian linguistics, especially the contribution to the reform of Serbian Cyrillic. In the beginning Subotić wrote in Slavic Serbian Cyrillic, then he created his own scriptural system, with Vuk s graphemes supplemented with the grapeheme yat, which he stayed loyal to until his death, even in the time when after the last ban was lifted (1868) Vuk s alphabet had been widely accepted by the Serbs for more than a decade. The paper describes the scriptural systems which Subotić used in his works, defines the cause of changes in them and assesses the effectiveness of Subotić s final solution of the scriptural system.