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{{Infobox Language |name=Croatian |nativename= Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) |pronunciation= |familycolor=Indo-European |states=Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia (Vojvodina), Montenegro and others |region=Central Europe, Southern Europe |speakers=6,214,643 (1995) |rank=approximately (95) |fam2=Balto-Slavic |fam3=Slavic |fam4=South Slavic |fam5=WesternCite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). who suggested ‹je›, i.e. mljeko. The current practice is to write ‹ije›. Most grammars, such as the Hrvatska gramatika published by the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, describe it as a diphthong.

When greater precision is desired, /e/ and /o/ can be transcribed as and respectively.

The syllabic trill can also be either long or short, and can carry the rising or falling pitch accent (see below).

Pretonic syllables are always short. Posttonic syllables may have either short or long vowels, the latter is usually marked with a macron.

Pitch accent

Croatian has a two-way pitch accent. When a syllable is stressed, it may have either a rising or a falling tone. Although the distinction is meaningful, it is not represented in Croatian orthography. In the descriptive literature, five diacritics are used that are specific to Croatian. They are:

Lexical words (such as nouns) of one syllable always have 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. Words of more than one syllable may instead have a rising tone, on any syllable but the last.

Enclitics (little grammatical words which latch on to a preceding lexical word) never have tone. Proclitics (clitics which latch on to a following word), on the other hand, may "steal" a falling tone (but not a rising tone or the vowel length) from the following word. The stolen accent may end up being either falling or rising on the proclitic:

ȍko /ôko/ (eye) - ȕ oko /û oko/ (in the eye);

grad /ɡrâːd/ (town) - u grad /û ɡraːd/ (in the town);

šuma /ʃûma/ (forest) - but u šumi /ǔ ʃumi/ (in the forest).

Proclitic system rules are rather omitted in western and northern parts of Croatia, particularly around Zagreb and other centres, and practically no one who claims to speak "Standard Croatian" pronounces the proclitics as they should be (and mostly are) pronounced in Shtokavian areas. They simply act as enclitics. Thus, u oko , u šumi , etc. will always be heard.

Consonants

The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants.

Voicing contrasts are neutralized in consonant clusters, so that all obstruents are either voiced or voiceless depending on the voicing of the final consonant. This process of voicing assimilation may be blocked by syllable boundaries.

/r/ can be syllabic, playing the role of the syllable nucleus in certain words (occasionally, it can even have a long accent). For example, the tongue-twister navrh brda vrba mrda involves four words with syllabic /r/. A similar feature exists in Czech, Slovak, Macedonian and Serbian. Very rarely other sonorants can be syllabic, like /l/ (in bicikl), /ʎ/ (surname Štarklj), /n/ (unit njutn), as well as /m/ and /ɲ/ in slang.

Grammar

Morphology

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 neutral 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.

Language examples

Notturno (A. G. Matoš)

Mlačna noć; u selu lavež; kasan

Ćuk il' netopir;

ljubav cvijeća - miris jak i strasan

Slavi tajni pir.

Sitni cvrčak sjetno cvrči, jasan

Kao srebren vir;

Teške oči sklapaju se na san,

S neba rosi mir.

S mrkog tornja bat

Broji pospan sat,

Blaga svjetlost sipi sa visina;

Kroz samoću, muk,

Sve je tiši huk:

Željeznicu guta već daljina.

Lord's Prayer

Oče naš, koji jesi na nebesima,

sveti se ime Tvoje.

Dođi kraljevstvo Tvoje,

budi volja Tvoja,

kako na Nebu, tako i na Zemlji.

Kruh naš svagdašnji daj nam danas,

i otpusti nam duge naše,

kako i mi otpuštamo dužnicima našim.

I ne uvedi nas u napast,

nego izbavi nas od zla.

Bible (opening passage)

U početku stvori Bog nebo i zemlju.

2 Zemlja bijaše pusta i prazna; tama se prostirala nad bezdanom i Duh Božji lebdio je nad vodama.

3 I reče Bog: "Neka bude svjetlost!" I bi svjetlost.

Month names

Croatian English Siječanj January Veljača February Ožujak March Travanj April Svibanj May Lipanj June Srpanj July Kolovoz August Rujan September Listopad October Studeni November Prosinac December

Relation to Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Serbian

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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 Neoštokavian dialect with Ijekavian pronunciation 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 Neoštokavian 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 establishment of the Yugoslav state was an important event in the history of the Croatian language.

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 Lexicographic 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 Serbian Ekavian language, 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 (and, strictly linguistically speaking, "the death of Serbo-Croatian"). 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.

Political ambitions played a key role in the creation of the "Serbo-Croatian language". Likewise, politics again were a crucial agent in dissolving the unified language. With the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Serbo-Croatian language officially followed suit.

Current events

Croatian language 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. Judging by the patterns of the neighbouring South Slavic languages, it is most likely that Croatian will remain a language of academy and not a demotic language (e.g. English, Greek).

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. 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.

See also

• Croatian grammar
• Baška tablet
• Days of the Croatian Language
• Differences in official languages in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia
• Swadesh list of Slavic languages
• Croatian National Corpus
• Serbo-Croatian language

Notes

1. Template:Hr icon Croatica et Slavica Iadertina , Vol.1 No.1. January 2006 Josip Miletić: Povijesni razlozi terminoloških promjena u novom hrvatskom kaznenom zakonodavstvu
2. "From Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International". Ethnologue.com. Retrieved 2010-01-26.
3. "Babić - Finka - Moguš : Hrvatski Pravopis". Sveznadar.com. Retrieved 2010-01-26.
4. "Vladimir Anić : Veliki Rječnik Hrvatskoga Jezika". Sveznadar.com. Retrieved 2010-01-26.
5. "Jure Šonje Gl.Ured. : Rječnik Hrvatskoga Jezika". Sveznadar.com. Retrieved 2010-01-26.
6. "Skupina Autora : Hrvatski Enciklopedijski Rječnik". Sveznadar.com. Retrieved 2010-01-26.
7. "Barić - Lončarić - Malić I Dr. : Hrvatska Gramatika". Sveznadar.com. Retrieved 2010-01-26.

References

• Branko Franolić, Mateo Zagar: A Historical Outline of Literary Croatian & The Glagolitic Heritage of Croatian Culture, Erasmus & CSYPN, London & Zagreb 2008 ISBN 978-953-6132-80-5
• Ivo Banac: Main Trends in the Croatian Language Question, YUP 1984
• Branko Franolić: A Historical Survey of Literary Croatian, Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1984
• Branko Franolić: A Bibliography of Croatian Dictionaries, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1985 139p
• Branko Franolić: Language Policy in Yugoslavia with special reference to Croatian, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Latines 1988
• Milan Moguš: A History of the Croatian Language, NZ Globus, 1995
• Miro Kačić: Croatian and Serbian: Delusions and Distortions, Novi Most, Zagreb 1997
• "Hrvatski naš (ne)zaboravljeni" (Croatian, our (un)forgotten language), Stjepko Težak, 301 p., knjižnica Hrvatski naš svagdašnji (knj. 1), Tipex, Zagreb, 1999, ISBN 953-6022-35-4 (Croatian)

External links

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• Ethnologue: Languages of the World (unknown ed.). SIL International.
• EUdict - online dictionary - translation from Croatian into many languages and vice versa
• Croatian Language Portal Template:Hr icon
• Croatian Old Dictionary Portal
• Croatian language - basic phrases and general expressions
• Croatian for travellers
• Croatian Language Study abroad

Language history

• Croatian Glagolitic Script
• Croatian Cyrillic Script
• Croatian Glagolitic Manuscripts held outside of Croatia
• The Croatian Language Today, a lecture given by dr. Branko Franolić

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• Croatian language
• Languages of Croatia
• Languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Languages of Serbia
• Languages of Vojvodina
• Languages of Austria
• Languages of Hungary
• Languages of Molise
• South Slavic languages