Croatian

Introduction

Yugoslav Map 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, Croatian sea 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 Churches "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 Children smiling 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.

Dialects

Women Dancing

The complex dialect picture of Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian is shared by all the languages.

1. The major dialectal difference is based on the pronounciation of the iniitial consonant in the word for "what."

Shtokavian	Chakavian	Kajkavian
shto	*cha*	*kaj*

1. Shtokavian has three varieties, based on three different present-day pronunciations of the vowels that replaced the Common Slavic long vowel [æ], known as jat'.

Common Slavic	Ekavian	Ikavian	Ijekavian
*væra "faith"	*vera*	*vira*	*vjera*
.	Most widely spoken dialect on which Standard Serbian is based.	Spoken only in Croatia, serves as basis for standard Croatian.	Spoken in Bosnia and Hercegovina, provides the basis for Standard Bosnian.

*reconstructed form

Structure

Sound System

Children playing

Vowels
Croatian has 5 vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /u/, /o/. Vowels can be long or short. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning.

Consonants
Croatian has 25 consonant phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning.

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Alveo-palatal	Velar
Stops	p-b	..	t-d	..	..	k-g
Fricatives	.	f-v	s-z	.	sh-zh	x
Affricates	.	.	ts-dz	ch-dj(1)	ch(2)	.
Nasals	m	.	n-n'(3)	.	.	.
Lateral	.	.	l-l'(4)	.	.	.
Trill	.	.	r	.	.	.
Semi-vowel	.	.	.	.	j	.

(1)	ch as in cheap; dj as in jeep
(2)	ch as in church
(3)	palatalized, similar to the ny in canyon
(4)	palatalized, similar to the l in volume

Consonant clusters are either all voiced or all voiceless, i.e., they assimilate to the last consonant in the cluster. This rule does not apply to nasals, laterals, or trills.

The consonant /r/ can be syllable-forming, e.g., hrvatski "Croatian."

Stress
Croatian has a pitch stress. Monosyllabic words always have a 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. However, they may instead have a rising tone, on any syllable but the last.

Click here to listen to some common phrases in Croatian.

Grammar

Woman with hat

People Dancing

Man and Woman in Costume

Croatian grammar is similar in complexity to the grammar of most other Slavic languages.

Nouns
Croatian nouns are marked for gender, number, and case. The three are fused into one ending, as is the case in all Slavic languages.

genders: masculine, feminine, neuter;
numbers: singular, plural, with some vestiges of dual;
cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional, vocative, however few nouns have retained the vocative forms, and the locative and dative forms are almost identical.

Adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case.

Verbs
Croatian verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. They are marked for the following categories:

three persons (first, second, third);
two numbers (singular and plural);
three tenses (present, past, future; present and future have the same endings);
two aspects (imperfective and perfective);
three moods (indicative, imperative, conditional);
three voices (active, middle, and passive).

Croatian aspect involves grammar, lexicon, semantics, and pragmatics. Perfective verbs are formed by prefixation. The system is complex enough to have occupied generations of linguists and frustrated generations of learners.

Verbs of motion constitute a special subcategory of Croatian verbs. They are characterized by a complex system of directional and aspectual prefixes and suffixes.

Word order
The neutral word order in Croatian is Subject-Verb-Object. However, other orders are possible. Inflectional endings take care of keeping clear grammatical relations and roles in the sentence. Word order is principally determined by topic (what the sentence is about, or old information) and focus (new information). Constituents with old information precede constituents with new information, or those that carry the most emphasis.

Vocabulary

Old Man

The differences between Croatian on the one hand and Serbian and Bosnian on the other occur mostly in the lexicon. Croatian has preserved more native Slavic words, while Serbian, and to some extent Bosnian, have borrowed more from Russian and western European languages.

Some loanwords may differ slightly across the three languages because, historically, in Croatian, they came mostly from German and Italian, while Serbian borrowed words mostly from French and Russian.

Croatian	Serbian	Bosnian	.
organizirati	organizovati	organizirati	"to organize"
realizirati	realizovati	realizirati	"to realize"
minuta	minut	minut	"minute"

An interesting difference in basic vocabulary between Croatian, on the one hand, and Serbian and Bosnian, on the other hand, involves the names of the months. While Serbian and Bosnian borrowed the names from western languages, Croatian uses inherently Slavic words, e.g., Croatian travanj and Serbian /Bosnian april, Croatian listopad (literally "leaf fall") and Bosnian/Bosnian oktobar.

Below are some common phrases in Croatian.

Hello.	*zdravo*
Good bye
Please	*molim*
Thank you	*hvala*
Excuse me	*izvinite*
Yes	da
No	ne

Below are the numbers 1-10 in Croatian.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
jedan	dva	tri	cetiri	pet	sest	sedam	osam	devet	deset

Writing

12th century Croatian document in Latin script

Cyrill
Cyrill & Methodius

The original alphabet used by both the Serbs and Croats was Glagolitic. It was created by the monks Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century for Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the time. In the Orthodox areas of Serbia and Bosnia, Glagolitic was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in the 12th century.

The Cyrillic alphabet (along with the Latin alphabet, which was adopted in Catholic areas) was reformed by linguists in the 19th century to create a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters as well as a one-to-one correspondence between the symbols in the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was revised by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in the 19th century. The Croatian Latin alphabet was revised shortly afterwards by Ljudevit Gaj who added five extra symbols to the standard Latin alphabet by borrowing letters from Czech and Polish, and inventing the digraphs "lj", "nj" and "dž" for phonemes represented by single letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. The two alphabets map well onto each other.

Croats in Croatia, and Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia and Hercegovina mostly use the Latin alphabet.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Croatian.

Ljudevit Gaj

Translation
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Resources

Click here to find out where Croatian is taught in the United States.
Click here to find teaching materials for Croatian.

Resources for the study of Bosnian language and culture
Ethnologue entry for Croatian
UCLA Language Profile for Croatian
SEELRC Webliogrphy for Serbian and Croatian
Yamada Language Center Guide for Serbian and Croatian
Omniglot Guide for writing Serbian and Croatian
Wikipedia article on Serbo-Croatian
Croatian Language Links
BBC News Country Profiles: Croatia
Library of Congress Portals to the World: Croatia