Croatian Language Services

Croatian (hrvatski jezik) is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries. They are varieties of the Serbo-Croatian language, along with Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. Standard and literary Croatian is based on the central dialect, Shtokavian (Štokavian), more specifically on Eastern Herzegovinian, which is also the basis of standard Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. The two other principal Croatian dialects are Chakavian (Čakavian) and Kajkavian. These dialects, and the four national standards, are commonly 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. The oldest texts in Croatian date back to the 11th century and were written in the Glagolitic alphabet, mainly in Croatia. The earliest text in the Latin alphabet dates from 1345. The Glagolitic alphabet was eventually replaced by the Latin alphabet in Croatia. Up to the mid 19th century there was no standard written form of Croatian, but there was extensive literature in different dialects. In 1850 a group of Serbian and Croatian writers and linguists decided to create a standard written form based on the widely-used Štokavian dialect. Croatian contains many words of Latin and German origin but many new Croatian words are created by combining and adapting existing ones. Croatian is closely related to and mutually intelligible with Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin.