Croatian ( hrvatski )

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Croatian belongs to the South Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian, defined as the common language of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Montenegrins, officially split into three mutually intelligible languages -- Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. Though the term "Serbo-Croatian" went out of use, it continues to be a focus of controversy due to its historical, cultural, and political connotations and to the lack of precision in the definition of the term "language." Suffice it to say that these languages are artifacts of political, rather than linguistic decisions.

The eastern part of Yugoslavia (i.e., Serbia, Montenegro, portions of Bosnia and Hercegovina) were religiously and culturally distinct from the western part of of the country (i.e., Croatia, and portions of Bosnia and Hercegovina). Serbia was under Ottoman rule, while Croatia was under Austro-Hungarian rule As a result, Serbian and Croatian are based on different dialects and are written with different alphabets. Serbian and Croatian became one language in the 19th century as part of an effort to create an independent South Slavic state (yug means "south").

Although Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian differ in a number of ways, these differences do not preclude mutual intelligibility and, in fact, are not as great as the differences within the languages themselves. This is not surprising since the continuous migrations of Slavic populations during the five hundred years of Turkish rule produced a crazy quilt of local dialects that cross more recently established national boundaries.

Standard Croatian based on the Shtokavian and Ikavian pronunciation, is the official language of Croatia. It is spoken by 4.8 million people in Croatia in all areas of public and private life. It is also spoken in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, Australia, U.S., and Canada. Ethnologue estimates that about 6.2 million people worldwide speak Croatian.

In 1967, Croatian scholars and writers issued the Declaration Concerning the Name and Status of the Literary Language, calling for wider use of Croatian in public life. In 1974, the Yugoslav constitution allowed each republic to identify its own official language. With the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Croatian played a significant role in helping to establish Croatia's identity as in independent state.

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