Croatian language

"Hrvatski" redirects here. For other uses, see Hrvatski (disambiguation).

Croatian
[hrvatski] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)
Pronunciation	[xř̩ʋaːtskiː]
Native to	Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia (Vojvodina), Montenegro and others
Region	Central Europe, Southern Europe
Native speakers	10.5 million (2001)
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic South Slavic Western Serbo-Croatian Croatian
Dialects	Chakavian Kajkavian Shtokavian (standard) Torlakian
Writing system	Latin
Official status
Official language in	Croatia Bosnia and Herzegovina Austria (in Burgenland) Romania(in Caraşova) Italy (in Molise) Serbia
Regulated by	Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics (Council for Standard Croatian Language Norm)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	hr
ISO 639-2	hrv
ISO 639-3	hrv

Croatian ([Hrvatski] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is a South Slavic language spoken chiefly by Croats in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and neighbouring countries, as well as by the Croatian diaspora worldwide.

Croatian is written in Gaj's Latin alphabet. There are three principal dialects: Shtokavian, Chakavian, and Kajkavian, along with a few Croatian speakers of a fourth, Torlakian. The literary and standard language is based on Shtokavian, which is also the basis of Standard Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. These are commonly subsumed under the term Serbo-Croatian in English, though this term controversal for linguistic and political reasons.

History

Early development

The beginning of the Croatian written language can be traced to the 9th century, when Old Church Slavonic was adopted as the language of the liturgy. This language was gradually adapted to non-liturgical purposes and became known as the Croatian version of Old Slavonic. The two variants of the language, liturgical and non-liturgical, continued to be a part of the Glagolitic service as late as the middle of the 9th century.

Until the end of the 11th century Croatian medieval texts were written in three scripts: Latin, Glagolitic, and Croatian Cyrillic (arvatica, poljičica, bosančica/bosanica), and also in three languages: Croatian, Latin and Old Slavonic. The latter developed into what is referred to as the Croatian variant of Church Slavonic between the 12th and 16th centuries.

The most important early monument of Croatian literacy is the Baška tablet from the late 11th century. It is a large stone tablet found in the small church of St. Lucy on the Croatian island of Krk which contains text written mostly in Čakavian, today a dialect of Croatian, and in Croatian angular Glagolitic script. It is also important in the history of the nation as it mentions Zvonimir, the king of Croatia at the time. However, the luxurious and ornate representative texts of Croatian Church Slavonic belong to the later era, when they coexisted with the Croatian vernacular literature. The most notable are the "Missal of Duke Novak" from the Lika region in northwestern Croatia (1368), "Evangel from Reims" (1395, named after the town of its final destination), Hrvoje's Missal from Bosnia and Split in Dalmatia (1404) and the first printed book in Croatian language, the Glagolitic Missale Romanum Glagolitice (1483).

During the 13th century Croatian vernacular texts began to appear, the most important among them being the "Istrian land survey" of 1275 and the "Vinodol Codex" of 1288, both written in the Čakavian dialect.

The Štokavian dialect literature, based almost exclusively on Čakavian original texts of religious provenance (missals, breviaries, prayer books) appeared almost a century later. The most important purely Štokavian vernacular text is the Vatican Croatian Prayer Book (ca. 1400).

Both the language used in legal texts and that used in Glagolitic literature gradually came under the influence of the vernacular, which considerably affected its phonological, morphological and lexical systems. From the 14th and the 15th centuries, both secular and religious songs at church festivals were composed in the vernacular.

Writers of early Croatian religious poetry (začinjavci), translators and editors gradually introduced the vernacular into their works. These začinjavci were the forerunners of the rich literary production of the 15th and 16th centuries. The language of religious poems, translations, miracle and morality plays contributed to the popular character of medieval Croatian literature.

• 
  Baška tablet, Island Krk ca. 1100
• 
  A page from the Istarski razvod of 1526
• 
  The Vinodol Codex, 1288
• 
  Glagolitic Missal of Duke Novak, 1368
• 
  Vatican Croatian Prayer Book

Modern language and standardisation

See also: Croatian-language grammar books and Croatian dictionaries

The first purely vernacular texts in Croatian date back to the 13th century (e.g. thw Vatican Croatian Prayer Book from 1400) and are distinctly different from Church Slavonic. In the 14th and 15th centuries the modern Croatian language emerged, with morphology, phonology and syntax) only slightly differ from the contemporary Croatian standard language.

The standardization of the Croatian language can be traced back to the first Croatian dictionary written by Faust Vrančić (Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europae linguarum—Latinae, Italicae, Germanicae, Dalmatiae et Ungaricae, Venice 1595), and to the first Croatian grammar written by Bartul Kašić (Institutionum linguae illyricae libri duo, Rome 1604).

Jesuit Kašić's translation of the Bible (Old and New Testament, 1622–1636; unpublished until 2000), written in the ornate Štokavian-Ijekavian dialect of the Dubrovnik Renaissance literature is, despite orthographical differences, as close to the contemporary standard Croatian language as are the French of Montaigne's "Essays" or the English of the King James Bible to their respective successors—the modern standard languages.

This period, sometimes called "Baroque Slavism", was crucial in the formation of the literary idiom that was to become the Croatian standard language. The 17th century witnessed three developments that shaped modern Croatian:

• The linguistic works of Jesuit philologists Kašić and Mikalja;
• The literary activity of Bosnian Franciscan Matija Divković, whose Counter-Reformation writings, comprising popular tales from the Bible, sermons and polemics, were widespread among Croats both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia;
• The poetry of Ivan Gundulić from Dubrovnik.

This "triple achievement" of Baroque Slavism in the first half of the 17th century laid the firm foundation upon which the later Illyrian movement completed the work of language standardisation.

First attempts at standardisation

In the late medieval period up to the 17th century, the majority of semi-autonomous Croatia was ruled by two domestic dynasties of princes (banovi), the Zrinski and the Francopan, which were linked by inter-marriage. Toward the 17th century, both of them attempted to unify Croatia both culturally and linguistically, selecting as their official language the transitional Ikavian-Kajkavian dialect, this being an acceptable dialect intermediate between all the principal Croatian dialects (Chakavian, Kajkavian and Shtokavian); it is still used now in northern Istra, and in the valleys of the Kupa, Mrežnica and Sutla rivers, and sporadically elsewhere in central Croatia also.

This standardised form became the cultivated elite language of administration and intellectuals from the Istra peninsula along the Croatian coast, across central Croatia up into the northern valleys of the Drava and the Mura. The cultural apogee of this unified standard in the 17th century is represented by the editions of "Adrianskog mora sirena" ("Syren of Adriatic Sea") and "Putni tovaruš" ("Travelling escort"). However, this first linguistic renaissance in Croatia was halted by the political execution of both dynasties by the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna in 1671. Subsequently the Croatian elite in the 18th century gradually abandoned this combined Croatian standard, and after an Austrian initiative of 1850, it was replaced by the uniform Neo-Shtokavian.

Illyrian period

See also: Croatian linguistic purism

Croatian has three major dialects (broadly distinguished by the pronoun "what", which is ča, kaj, što in the Čakavian, Kajkavian and Štokavian dialects respectively) and has been written in three scripts (Glagolitic, Croatian/Western/Bosnian Cyrillic and Latin script, with Latin finally prevailing), and thus the formal shaping of the Croatian standard language was a process that took almost four centuries to complete. The final obstacle to a unified Croatian literary language was surmounted by the Croatian national awakener Ljudevit Gaj's standardization of Latin scriptory norm in 1830–1850s, based on the vernacular Croatian Troubadour, Renaissance and Baroque literature of 1490 to 1670 from Dalmatia, Dubrovnik and Boka Kotorska.

Gaj and his Illyrian movement centered in Kajkavian-speaking Zagreb were, however, more important politically than linguistically. They "chose" the Štokavian dialect because they didn't have any other realistic option— Neo-Štokavian, a version of Štokavian which emerged in the 15th and 16th century, was the major Croatian literary tongue from 1700s on. The 19th century linguists' and lexicographers' main concern was to achieve a more consistent and unified written norm and orthography; this led to a "passion for neologisms" or vigorous word coinage, originating from the purist nature of Croatian literary language. One of the peculiarities of the developmental trajectory of the Croatian language is that there is no single dominant figure among Croatian linguists and philologists, because the vernacular osmotically percolated into the "high culture" via literary works so there was no need for revolutionary linguistic upheavals—only reforms sufficed.

Sounds

Main article: Serbo-Croatian phonology

Vowels

Vowel chart for Croatian

The Standard Croatian vowel system has five monophthongal vowels. Although phonemic, the difference between long and short vowels is not represented in standard orthography, nor are any other features of prosody, which are noted only in the dictionaries and grammars. Schwa /ə/ also occurs allophonically.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i /i/		u /u/
Mid	e /e/		o /o/
Open		a /a/

Standard Croatian has the ijekavian ("ije") reflex of the Common Slavic yat vowel, represented in modern writing as the trigraph ‹ije›. There is some variation of the phonetic value and spelling of this reflex when long. The orthographic practice is a remnant of late 19th century codification efforts in which the development of a common orthography was planned for a common literary language of Serbs and Croats. In Ijekavian and Štokavian dialects in Eastern Herzegovia, this was a disyllabic (triphonemic /ije/) sequence; but in Western Štokavian dialects, Croats predominantly pronounced this as a monosyllable. Pressure from Vuk Karadžić, a major reformer of the Serbian alphabet, thought that the former pronunciation was ideal and this influenced the spelling used in Croatian (e.g. Serbian briȉjeg, zvijèzda and Croatian brijȇg, zvijézda.

There were two different attempts at addressing this problematic ‹ije› spelling. Dalibor Brozović and Stjepan Babić argued that this is a diphthong /ie/. Brozović suggested to the Council for Standard Croatian Language Norm that the spelling should change to ‹ie›, e.g. mlijeko > mlieko. The other method, largely neglected by the public, was that of Ivo Škarić, who suggested ‹je›, i.e. mljeko. The current practice is to write ‹ije›. Most grammars, such as the Hrvatska gramatika published by the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, describe it as a diphthong.

When greater precision is desired, /e/ and /o/ can be transcribed as [ɛ̝] and [ɔ̝] respectively.

The syllabic trill can also be either long or short, and can carry the rising or falling pitch accent (see below).

Pretonic syllables are always short. Posttonic syllables may have either short or long vowels, the latter is usually marked with a macron.

Pitch accent

Croatian has a two-way pitch accent. When a syllable is stressed, it may have either a rising or a falling tone. Although the distinction is meaningful, it is not represented in Croatian orthography. In the descriptive literature, five diacritics are used that are specific to Croatian. They are:

Slavicist symbol	IPA symbol	Description
e	[e]	non-tonic short vowel
ē	[eː]	non-tonic long vowel
è	[ě]	short vowel with rising tone
é	[ěː]	long vowel with rising tone
ȅ	[ê]	short vowel with falling tone
ȇ	[êː]	long vowel with falling tone

Lexical words (such as nouns) of one syllable always have falling tone. Words with two or more syllables may also have a falling tone, but (with the exception of foreign borrowings and interjections) only on the first syllable. Words of more than one syllable may instead have a rising tone, on any syllable but the last.

Enclitics (little grammatical words which latch on to a preceding lexical word) never have tone. Proclitics (clitics which latch on to a following word), on the other hand, may "steal" a falling tone (but not a rising tone or the vowel length) from the following word. The stolen accent may end up being either falling or rising on the proclitic:

ȍko /ôko/ (eye) - ȕ oko /û oko/ (in[to] the eye);

grad /ɡrâːd/ (town) - u grad /û ɡraːd/ (in[to] the town);

šuma /ʃûma/ (forest) - but u šumi /ǔ ʃumi/ (in the forest).

Proclitic system rules are rather omitted in western and northern parts of Croatia, particularly around Zagreb and other centres, and practically no one who claims to speak "Standard Croatian" pronounces the proclitics as they should be (and mostly are) pronounced in Shtokavian areas. They simply act as enclitics. Thus, u oko [u ȍko], u šumi [u ʃȕmi], etc. will always be heard.

Consonants

The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants.

	Labial		Alveolar		Post- alveolar		Palatal		Velar
Nasal	/m/ m		/n/ n				/ɲ/ nj
Plosive	/p/ p	/b/ b	/t/ t	/d/ d					/k/ k	/ɡ/ g
Affricate			/ts/ c		/tʃ/ č	/dʒ/ dž	/tɕ/ ć	/dʑ/ đ
Fricative	/f/ f		/s/ s	/z/ z	/ʃ/ š	/ʒ/ ž			/x/ h
Approximant		/ʋ/ v					/j/ j
Lateral			/l/ l				/ʎ/ lj
Trill			/r/ r

Voicing contrasts are neutralized in consonant clusters, so that all obstruents are either voiced or voiceless depending on the voicing of the final consonant. This process of voicing assimilation may be blocked by syllable boundaries.

/r/ can be syllabic, playing the role of the syllable nucleus in certain words (occasionally, it can even have a long accent). For example, the tongue-twister navrh brda vrba mrda involves four words with syllabic /r/. A similar feature exists in Czech, Slovak, Macedonian and Serbian. Very rarely other sonorants can be syllabic, like /l/ (in bicikl), /ʎ/ (surname Štarklj), /n/ (unit njutn), as well as /m/ and /ɲ/ in slang.

Grammar

Main article: Serbo-Croatian grammar

Morphology

Croatian, like most other Slavic languages, has a rich system of inflection. Pronouns, nouns, adjectives and some numerals decline (change the word ending to reflect case, i.e. grammatical category and function), while verbs conjugate for person and tense. As in all other Slavic languages, the basic word order is SVO; however, due to the use of declension to show sentence structure, word order is not as important as in languages that tend toward analyticity such as English or Chinese. Deviations from the standard SVO order are stylistically marked and may be employed to convey a particular emphasis, mood or overall tone, according to the intentions of the speaker or writer. Often, such deviations will sound literary, poetical or archaic.

Nouns have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) that correspond to a certain extent with the word ending, so that most nouns ending in -a are feminine, -o and -e neutral and the rest mostly masculine with a small but important class of feminines. Grammatical gender of a noun affects the morphology of other parts of speech (adjectives, pronouns and verbs) attached to it. Nouns are declined into 7 cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative, Locative and Instrumental.

Verbs are divided into two broad classes according to their aspect, which can be either perfective (signifying a completed action) or imperfective (action is incomplete or repetitive). There are seven tenses, four of which (present, perfect, future I and II) are used in contemporary standard Croatian, with the other three (aorist, imperfect and plusquamperfect) used much less frequently - the plusquamperfect is generally limited to written language and some more educated speakers, while aorist and imperfect are considered stylistically marked and rather archaic. Note, however, that some non-standard dialects make considerable (and thus unmarked) use of those tenses.

Language examples

Notturno (A. G. Matoš)

Mlačna noć; u selu lavež; kasan

Ćuk il' netopir;

ljubav cvijeća - miris jak i strasan

Slavi tajni pir.

Sitni cvrčak sjetno cvrči, jasan

Kao srebren vir;

Teške oči sklapaju se na san,

S neba rosi mir.

S mrkog tornja bat

Broji pospan sat,

Blaga svjetlost sipi sa visina;

Kroz samoću, muk,

Sve je tiši huk:

Željeznicu guta već daljina.

Lord's Prayer

Oče naš, koji jesi na nebesima,

sveti se ime Tvoje.

Dođi kraljevstvo Tvoje,

budi volja Tvoja,

kako na Nebu, tako i na Zemlji.

Kruh naš svagdašnji daj nam danas,

i otpusti nam duge naše,

kako i mi otpuštamo dužnicima našim.

I ne uvedi nas u napast,

nego izbavi nas od zla.

Bible (opening passage)

U početku stvori Bog nebo i zemlju.

2 Zemlja bijaše pusta i prazna; tama se prostirala nad bezdanom i Duh Božji lebdio je nad vodama.

3 I reče Bog: "Neka bude svjetlost!" I bi svjetlost.

Month names

Main article: Croatian months

Croatian English Siječanj January Veljača February Ožujak March Travanj April Svibanj May Lipanj June Srpanj July Kolovoz August Rujan September Listopad October Studeni November Prosinac December

Relation to Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Serbian

Main article: Differences between standard Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian

The 19th century language development overlapped with the upheavals that befell the Serbian language. It was Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, a self-taught linguist and folkorist, whose scriptory and orthographic stylization of Serbian folk idiom made a radical break with the past; until his activity in the first half of the 19th century, Serbs had been using the Serbian redaction of Church Slavonic and a hybrid Russian-Slavonic language. His Serbian Dictionary, published in Vienna 1818 (along with the appended grammar), was the single most significant work of Serbian literary culture that shaped the profile of Serbian language (and, the first Serbian dictionary and grammar thus far).

Following the incentive of Austrian bureaucracy which preferred a common literary language of Serbs and Croats languages for practical administrative reasons, in 1850, Slovene philologist Franc Miklošič initiated a meeting of two Serbian philologists and writers, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Đuro Daničić together with five Croatian "men of letters": Ivan Mažuranić, Dimitrija Demeter, Stjepan Pejaković, Ivan Kukuljević and Vinko Pacel. The Vienna Literary Agreement on the basic features of a common literary language based on the Neoštokavian dialect with Ijekavian pronunciation was signed by all eight participants (including Miklošič).

Karadžić's influence on Croatian standard idiom was only one of the reforms for Croats, mostly in some aspects of grammar and orthography; many other changes he made to Serbian were already present in Croatian literary tradition (which also historically flourished in other dialects). Both literary languages shared the common basis of South Slavic Neoštokavian dialect, but the Vienna agreement didn't have any real effect until a more unified standard appeared at the end of 19th century when Croatian sympathizers of Vuk Karadžić, known as the Croatian Vukovians, wrote the first modern (from the vantage point of dominating neogrammarian linguistic school) grammars, orthographies and dictionaries of the language which they called Serbo-Croatian, Croato-Serbian or Croatian or Serbian. Monumental grammar authored by pre-eminent fin de siècle Croatian linguist Tomislav Maretić (Grammar and stylistics of Croatian or Serbian language, 1899), dictionary by Ivan Broz and Franjo Iveković (Croatian dictionary, 1901), and an orthography by Broz (Croatian Orthography, 1892) fixed the elastic (grammatically, syntactically, lexically) standard of Croatian literary idiom that is used to this day.

The establishment of the Yugoslav state was an important event in the history of the Croatian language.

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1918–1929), after the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–1941) was pronounced, tried to use a joint language of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs ─ in the spirit of supra-national Yugoslav ideology. This meant that Croatian and Serbian were no longer officially developed individually side by side, instead there was an attempt to forge all three into one language. As Serbs were by far the largest single ethnic group in the kingdom, this forging was resultant in a Serbian-based language, which meant a certain degree of Serbianization of the Croatian language. E.g., Croatian terminology in penal legislation was significantly Serbianized after 1929, with unification of terminology in Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the lexical, syntactical, orthographical and morphological characteristics of "Serbo-Croato-Slovene" were officially prescribed for Croatian textbooks and general communication.

This process of "unification" into one Serbo-Croatian language was preferred by neo-grammarian Croatian linguists, the most notable example being the influential philologist and translator Tomislav Maretić. However, this school was virtually extinct by the late 1920s and since then leading Croatian linguists (such as Petar Skok, Stjepan Ivšić and Petar Guberina) were unanimous in the re-affirmation of the Croatian purist tradition.

The situation somewhat eased in the run-up to World War II (cf. the establishment of Banovina of Croatia within Yugoslavia in 1939), but with the capitulation of Yugoslavia and the creation of the Axis puppet regime (the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945) came another, this time hardly predictable and grotesque attack on standard Croatian: the totalitarian dictatorship of Ante Pavelić pushed natural Croatian purist tendencies to ludicrous extremes and tried to re-impose older morphonological orthography preceding Ivan Broz's orthographical prescriptions from 1892. An official order signed by Pavelić and co-signed by Mile Budak and Milovan Žanić in August 1941 deprecated some imported words and forbade the use of any foreign words that could be replaced with Croatian neologisms.

However, Croatian linguists and writers were strongly opposed to such "language planning" in the same way that they rejected pro-Serbian forced unification in monarchist Yugoslavia. Not surprisingly, no Croatian dictionaries or Croatian grammars were published in this period.

In the Communist period (1945 to 1990), it was the by-product of Communist centralism and "internationalism". Whatever the intentions, the result was the same: the suppression of the basic features that differentiate Croatian from Serbian, both in terms of orthography and vocabulary. No Croatian dictionaries (apart from historical "Croatian or Serbian", conceived in the 19th century) appeared until 1985, when centralism was well in the process of decay.

In Communist Yugoslavia, Serbian language and terminology were un-officially dominant in a few areas: the military (officially: 1963-1974), diplomacy, Federal Yugoslav institutions (various institutes and research centres), state media, and jurisprudence at the federal level. Also encouraged by the state, language in Bosnia and Herzegovina was gradually Serbianized in all levels of the educational system and the republic's administration. Virtually the only institution of any importance where the Croatian language was dominant had been the Lexicographic Institute in Zagreb, headed by Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža.

Notwithstanding the declaration of intent of AVNOJ (The Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia) in 1944, which proclaimed the equality of all languages of Yugoslavia (Slovene, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian)– everything had, in practice, been geared towards the supremacy of the Serbian language. This was done under the pretext of "mutual enrichment" and "togetherness", hoping that the transient phase of relatively peaceful life among peoples in Yugoslavia would eventually give way to one of fusion into the supra-national Yugoslav nation and, arguably, provide a firmer basis for Serbianization. However, this "supra-national engineering" was arguably doomed from the outset. The nations that formed the Yugoslav state were formed long before its incipience and all unification pressures only poisoned and exacerbated inter-ethnic/national relations, causing the state to become merely ephemeral. However legal texts were translated to all four official Slavic languages (from 1944), as well as to Albanian and Hungarian (from 1970).

The single most important effort by ruling Yugoslav Communist elites to erase the "differences" between Croatian and Serbian– and in practice impose Serbian Ekavian language, written in Latin script, as the "official" language of Yugoslavia– was the so-called "Novi Sad Agreement". Twenty five Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin philologists came together in 1954 to sign the Agreement. A common Serbo-Croatian or "Croato-Serbian" orthography was compiled in 1960 in an atmosphere of state repression and fear. There were 18 Serbs and 7 Croats in Novi Sad. The "Agreement" was seen by the Croats as a defeat for the Croatian cultural heritage. According to the eminent Croatian linguist Ljudevit Jonke, it was imposed on the Croats. The conclusions were formulated according to goals which had been set in advance, and discussion had no role whatsoever. In the more than a decade that followed, the principles of the Novi Sad Agreement were put into practice.

A collective Croatian reaction against such de facto Serbian imposition erupted on March 15, 1967. On that day, nineteen Croatian scholarly institutions and cultural organizations dealing with language and literature (Croatian Universities and Academies), including foremost Croatian writers and linguists (Miroslav Krleža, Radoslav Katičić, Dalibor Brozović and Tomislav Ladan among them) issued the "Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Standard Language". In the Declaration, they asked for amendment to the Constitution expressing two claims:

• the equality not of three but of four literary languages, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, and Macedonian, and consequently, the publication of all federal laws and other federal acts in four instead of three languages.
• the use of the Croatian standard language in schools and all mass communication media pertaining to the Republic of Croatia. The Declaration accused the federal authorities in Belgrade of imposing Serbian as the official state language and downgrading Croatian to the level of a local dialect.

Notwithstanding the fact that "Declaration" was vociferously condemned by Yugoslav Communist authorities as an outburst of "Croatian nationalism", Serbo-Croatian forced unification was essentially halted and an uneasy status quo remained until the end of Communism. The "Declaration" succeeded in establishing a Constitutional norm by which in the Socialist Republic of Croatia the official language was the Croatian literary language which could be called Croatian or Serbian.

In the decade between the death of Marshall Tito (1980) and the final collapse of communism and the Yugoslavian federal state (1990/1991), major works that manifested the irrepressibility of Croatian linguistic culture had appeared. The studies of Brozović, Katičić and Babić that had been circulating among specialists or printed in the obscure philological publications in the 60s and 70s (frequently condemned and suppressed by the authorities) have finally, in the climate of dissolving authoritarianism, been published. This was a formal "divorce" of Croatian from Serbian (and, strictly linguistically speaking, "the death of Serbo-Croatian"). These works, based on modern fields and theories (structuralist linguistics and phonology, comparative-historical linguistics and lexicology, transformational grammar and areal linguistics) revised or discarded older "language histories", and restored the continuity of the Croatian language by definitely reintegrating and asserting specific Croatian characteristics (phonetic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, etc.) that had been constantly suppressed in both Yugoslavian states and finally gave modern linguistic description and prescription to the Croatian language. Among many monographs and serious studies, one could point to works issued by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, particularly Katičić's Syntax and Babić's Word-formation.

After the collapse of Communism and the birth of Croatian independence (1991), the situation with regard to the Croatian language has become stabilized. No longer under negative political pressures and de-Croatization impositions, Croatian linguists expanded the work on various ambitious programs and intensified their studies on current dominant areas of linguistics: mathematical and corpus linguistics, textology, psycholinguistics, language acquisition and historical lexicography. From 1991 on, numerous representative Croatian linguistic works were published, among them four voluminous monolingual dictionaries of contemporary Croatian, various specialized dictionaries and normative manuals (the most representative being the issue of the Institute for Croatian Language and Linguistics). For a curious bystander, probably the most noticeable language feature in Croatian society was the re-Croatization of Croatian in all areas, from phonetics to semantics and (most evidently) in everyday vocabulary.

Political ambitions played a key role in the creation of the "Serbo-Croatian language". Likewise, politics again were a crucial agent in dissolving the unified language. With the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Serbo-Croatian language officially followed suit.

Current events

Areas where Croatian language is spoken (as of 2006)

Croatian language is today the official language of the Republic of Croatia and, along with Bosnian and Serbian, one of three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is also official in the regions of Burgenland (Austria), Molise (Italy) and Vojvodina (Serbia). Additionally, it has co-official status alongside Romanian in the communes of Caraşova and Lupac, Romania. In these localities, Croats or Krashovani make up the majority of the population, and education, signage and access to public administration and the justice system are provided in Croatian, alongside Romanian. There are eight Croatian language universities in the world: the universities of Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, Osijek, Zadar, Dubrovnik, Pula, and Mostar.

There is at present no sole regulatory body which determines correct usage of the Croatian language. There is however an Institute for the Croatian language and linguistics with a prescription department. Judging by the patterns of the neighbouring South Slavic languages, it is most likely that Croatian will remain a language of academy and not a demotic language (e.g. English, Greek).

The current language standard is generally laid out in the grammar books and dictionaries used in education facilities, such as the school curriculum prescribed by the Ministry of Education and the university programmes of the Faculty of Philosophy at the four main universities. The most prominent recent editions describing the Croatian standard language are:

• Hrvatski pravopis by Babić, Finka, Moguš,
• Rječnik hrvatskoga jezika by Anić,
• Rječnik hrvatskoga jezika by Šonje et al.
• Hrvatski enciklopedijski rječnik, by a group of authors,
• Hrvatska gramatika by Barić et al.,

Also notable are the recommendations of Matica hrvatska, the national publisher and promoter of Croatian heritage, the Lexicographical institute "Miroslav Krleža", as well as the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

See also

• Croatian grammar
• Baška tablet
• Days of the Croatian Language
• Differences in official languages in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia
• Swadesh list of Slavic languages
• Croatian National Corpus
• Serbo-Croatian language

References

• Branko Franolić, Mateo Zagar: A Historical Outline of Literary Croatian & The Glagolitic Heritage of Croatian Culture, Erasmus & CSYPN, London & Zagreb 2008 ISBN 978-953-6132-80-5
• Ivo Banac: Main Trends in the Croatian Language Question, YUP 1984
• Branko Franolić: A Historical Survey of Literary Croatian, Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1984
• Branko Franolić: A Bibliography of Croatian Dictionaries, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1985 139p
• Branko Franolić: Language Policy in Yugoslavia with special reference to Croatian, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Latines 1988
• Milan Moguš: A History of the Croatian Language, NZ Globus, 1995
• Miro Kačić: Croatian and Serbian: Delusions and Distortions, Novi Most, Zagreb 1997
• "Hrvatski naš (ne)zaboravljeni" (Croatian, our (un)forgotten language), Stjepko Težak, 301 p., knjižnica Hrvatski naš svagdašnji (knj. 1), Tipex, Zagreb, 1999, ISBN 953-6022-35-4 (Croatian)

External links

• Ethnologue: Languages of the World (unknown ed.). SIL International.
• EUdict - online dictionary - translation from Croatian into many languages and vice versa
• Croatian Language Portal Template:Hr icon
• Croatian Old Dictionary Portal
• Croatian language - basic phrases and general expressions
• Croatian for travellers
• Croatian Language Study abroad

Language history

• Croatian Glagolitic Script
• Croatian Cyrillic Script
• Croatian Glagolitic Manuscripts held outside of Croatia
• The Croatian Language Today, a lecture given by dr. Branko Franolić