Croatian
Language · official in 2 countries and territories
Only Gaj's Latin alphabet is used to write Croatian, and its standard pronounces the old yat vowel the ijekavian way. Croatian, hrvatski, is the standard variety of Serbo-Croatian used mainly by Croats, built on Neo-Shtokavian from the mid-18th century onward. It is the national official language of Croatia and one of three in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The language on record
- Own name
- hrvatski
- ISO 639-1
- HR
- ISO 639-3
- HRV
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- South Slavic
- Official in
- 2 countries
Where Croatian is official
Croatia, where Croatian is the national language, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it shares official status with Bosnian and Serbian.
Official beside Croatian
About Croatian
When the Croatian standard took its shape
Three main dialects are spoken in Croatia: Shtokavian, Chakavian and Kajkavian. The first printed Croatian literary work, Marko Marulić's poem on the widow Judith of 1501, is in Chakavian. In the 17th century the Zrinski and Frankopan families tried to unify the country's written language by mixing all three, and a Kajkavian-Ikavian form became the language of administration from Istria to the Drava and Mura valleys. That effort stopped after Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan were executed in Vienna in 1671.
The 19th-century Illyrian movement set out to merge the regional written languages into one. Ljudevit Gaj standardised the Latin alphabet between 1830 and 1850 and backed Neo-Shtokavian, although he worked in Kajkavian-speaking Zagreb. The Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850 adopted Neo-Shtokavian as the base shared with Serbian. At the turn of the 20th century the Croatian Vukovians fixed Ijekavian Neo-Shtokavian as the literary standard and designed a phonological spelling.
Why linguists disagree about calling it a language
Standard Croatian and standard Serbian are close to 100% mutually intelligible, in the words of John F. Bailyn, who describes Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian as a single language with a single grammatical system. Most Croatian linguists regard Croatian as a separate language and a key to national identity, covering every form Croats have spoken and written. The Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language of 1967, in which Croatian authors and linguists asked for greater autonomy for Croatian, is counted in Croatia as a milestone of language policy. Fifty years later a meeting in Zagreb drafted the Declaration on the Common Language of Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs and Montenegrins, which describes one polycentric standard with several varieties, as German and Spanish have, and gathered more than ten thousand signatures.
Who sets the rules for Croatian now
No single body regulates it. In January 2023 the Croatian Parliament passed a law on the official use of Croatian that obliges state and local authorities to use it and sets up a Council for the Croatian language as an advisory body. In 2013 the education ministry gave the Hrvatski pravopis of the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics its sole seal of approval.
The same year Croatian became an official language of the European Union, when Croatia joined on 1 July 2013.
Common questions
Questions about Croatian
Does Croatian ever use Cyrillic?
No. Writing in the Latin alphabet alone is one of the marks that set the Croatian standard apart from Serbian, which uses both.
Where else is Croatian official at a regional level?
In Burgenland in Austria, Molise in Italy and Vojvodina in Serbia. In the Romanian communes of Carașova and Lupac, where Croats or Krashovani are the majority, it is co-official with Romanian in schools, on signs and in dealings with the administration and courts.
When did Croatian become an EU language?
On 1 July 2013, when Croatia joined. The EU began publishing a Croatian edition of its official gazette that year.