(in English)
Croatian, hrvatski
Spoken natively in Croatia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia (Vojvodina), Montenegro, Romania (Caraş-Severin
County), Slovenia, and diaspora.
Native speakers - 5.55 million (2001).
Language family - Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic, South Slavic, Western Serbo-Croatian, Croatian.
Standard forms - Standard
Croatian, Burgenland Croatian.
Writing system – Latin.
Official language in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro.
Croatian (hrvatski
jezik) is the Serbo-Croatian language as spoken by Croats, principally in
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other
neighbouring countries.
Standard and
literary Croatian is a register of the central dialect, Shtokavian (Štokavian),
more specifically on Eastern Herzegovinian, which is also the basis of standard
Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. The other dialects spoken by Croats are
Chakavian (Čakavian), Kajkavian, and Torlakian (by the Krashovani).
These four dialects, and the four national standards, are sometimes subsumed
under the term "Serbo-Croatian" in English, though this term is
controversial for native speakers and paraphrases such as "Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian"
are therefore sometimes used instead, especially in diplomatic circles.
Vernacular texts in
the Chakavian dialect first appeared in the 13th century, and Shtokavian texts
appeared a century later. Standardization began in the period sometimes called
"Baroque Slavism" in the first half of the 17th century, while some
authors date it back to the end of 15th century. The modern Neo-Shtokavian
standard that appeared in the mid 18th century was the first unified Croatian
literary language.
Croatian is written
in Gaj's Latin alphabet.
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 19th century. The earliest known Croatian Church Slavonic
Glagolitic manuscripts are the Glagolita Clozianus and the Vienna
Folia from the 11th 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 Chakavian,
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 Chakavian dialect.
The Shtokavian
dialect literature, based almost exclusively on Chakavian original texts of
religious provenance (missals, breviaries, prayer books) appeared almost a century
later. The most important purely Shtokavian 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) gradually introduced the
vernacular into their works. These začinjavci were the forerunners of
the rich literary production of the 16th century literature, which, depending
on the area, was Chakavian, Kajkavian or Shtokavian-based. The language of
religious poems, translations, miracle and morality plays contributed to the
popular character of medieval Croatian literature.
Modern language and standardisation
The first purely
vernacular texts in Croatian date back to the 14th century (e.g. the Vatican
Croatian Prayer Book from ca. 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 Shtokavian-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
Frankopan, which were linked by inter-marriage. Toward the 17th century, both
of them attempted to unify Croatia both culturally and linguistically, writing
in a mixture of all three principal dialects (Chakavian, Kajkavian and
Shtokavian), and calling it "Croatian" (sometimes using regional
names such as "Dalmatian" or "Slavonian"). It is still used
now in parts of Istria, which became a crossroads of various mixtures of
Chakavian with ekavian/ijekavian/ikavian dialects.
The most
standardised form (Kajkavian-Ikavian) became the cultivated elite language of
administration and intellectuals from the Istrian 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 "Adrianskoga mora sirena"
("Siren of Adriatic Sea") by Petar Zrinski and "Putni tovaruš"
("Traveling escort") by Katarina Zrinska.
However, this first
linguistic renaissance in Croatia was halted by the political execution of
Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan by the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I 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
The Illyrian
movement was a 19th-century movement in Croatia to standardise the Croatian
language in order to merge it into a common South Slavic language.
Specifically, Croatian had three major dialects, and there had been several
literary languages over four centuries. The leader of the Illyrian movement
Ljudevit Gaj standardized the Latin alphabet in 1830–1850 and worked to bring
about a standardised Croatian literary script. Although based in
Kajkavian-speaking Zagreb, Gaj supported using the more populous
neo-Shtokavian–—a version of Shtokavian that became the main Croatian and
Serbian literary language from the 18th century on——as the common literary
standard for Croatian and Serbian. Supported by various South Slavic
proponents, neo-Shtokavian was adopted at the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850,
uniting the Croat and Serb languages. The 19th century linguists' and
lexicographers' main concern was to achieve a more consistent and unified
written norm and orthography, which led to a "passion for neologisms"
or vigorous word coinage, originating from the purist nature of Croatian
literary language, which was not shared by Serbian.
Phonology and alphabet
Croatian has 30
phonemes—5 vowels and 25 consonants—corresponding to 30 letters of Croatian
alphabet, 3 of which are digraphs. Thus, the orthography is largely phonemic:
Croatian has pitch
accent: a vowel can be pronounced short or long, and when stressed (otherwise
it is non-tonic) it carries either falling or rising tone. The following
diacritical marks are used when vowels are stressed: short falling ⟨◌̏⟩ (double
grave accent), short rising ⟨◌̀⟩ (grave accent), long falling ⟨◌̑⟩ (inverted breve),
long rising ⟨◌́⟩ (acute accent). Unstressed long syllables are marked
with a macron ⟨◌̄⟩ on vowels, and unstressed short vowels are not marked.
This notation is used in linguistic literature, or when precision is necessary,
such as to disambiguate between homographs. Apart from these signs, in
general-purpose texts, the circumflex (denoting a long vowel) can also be used
to disambiguate homographs.
Grammar
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 neuter 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.
Sociopolitical standpoints
Croatian, although
technically a form of Serbo-Croatian, is sometimes considered a distinct
language by itself. Purely linguistic considerations of languages based on
mutual intelligibility (abstand languages) frequently clash with
sociopolitical conceptions of language, so that varieties which are mutually
intelligible may be designated separate languages. Along these lines, the
various varieties of Serbo-Croatian have distinct standard forms, the
differences are often exaggerated for political reasons, and many Croats and
even Croatian linguists regard Croatian as a separate language, and language is
considered key to national identity. Croatian is unique in being written
exclusively in the Latin script rather than in Cyrillic. The rejection of the
term "Serbo-Croatian" as a cover term for all these forms is often
based upon the argument that the official language in Yugoslavia, a
standardized form of Serbo-Croatian, was "artificial" or a political
tool used to combine two distinct people. Within ex-Yugoslavia, the term has
largely been replaced by the ethnic terms Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, which
have developed largely independently since the dissolution of Yugoslavia. These
have been used as language names historically as well, though not always
distinctively; the Croatian–Hungarian Agreement for example designated
"Croatian" as one of its official languages, and Croatian will become
an official EU language with the accession of Croatia.
Relation to 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 NeoShtokavian dialect with Ijekavian accent 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 NeoShtokavian 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 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 Yugoslav
Lexicographical 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 the Serbian Ekavian accent, 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. 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.
Current events
Croatian 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. 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. Attempts
are being made to revive Croatian literature in Italy. 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.
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