Croatian language

The Croatian language or Croatian dialect is a standard variant of the Serbo-Croatian language. The division is partly similar to that between the Spanish of Spain and that of Latin America, although the differences within the linguistic scope of Spanish are greater than those of Croatian and Serbian. Croatian and the other so-called varieties of Serbo-Croatian differ in little things (word usage, grammar); however, they are equivalent and mutually intelligible. Croatian is spoken mainly in Croatia, where it is official, as well as in the Croat-inhabited areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo.

It is also the native language spoken by the Croatian diaspora, which is found mostly in countries such as Germany, Romania, Canada, Slovakia, Australia, the United States and in South America (mainly Argentina and Chile), where there are large concentrations of native Croats or descendants of Croats who still maintain their customs, such as the language.

History

Early Development

Prince Novak's Missal.

The Vinodol Code.

The beginnings of the written language can be traced back to the IX century, when Old Church Slavonic was adopted as the liturgical language. Later it began to be used for secular purposes and became known as the Croatian version of Old Slavonic. The two variants; liturgical and secular, they continued in use until the middle of the IX century; written in the alphabet known as Glagolitic. Until the end of the XI century, medieval Croatian texts were written in three ways: Latin, Glagolitic, and Croatian Cyrillic (arvatica, poljičica, bosančica), and also in three languages: Croatian Slavic, Latin and Old Slavic. The latter, developed into what is referred to as the Croatian variant of Church Slavonic between the 12th and XVI. The most important ancient document of Croatian instruction is the Baška Table, from the end of the XI century. It is a large stone tablet found in the small church of Saint Lucia on the Croatian island of Krk, containing the text written in Chakavski (today a dialect of Croatian) and Glagolitic Croatian script. Today, there is a large number of monuments in stone or written in Glagolitic, and they are also considered important in the history of the nation; since they mention Zvonimir, then King of Croatia.

However, the lavish and ornate representational texts of Croatian Church Slavs belong to the XIII and centuries. ="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">XIV, when they coexisted with Croatian vernacular literature. They are the Prince Novak's Missal; of Istria (1368), the Gospel of Reims (1395), which received its name from the city where it finally arrived), the Missal of Duke Hrvoje of Bosnia and the < i>Fracture in Dalmatia (1404), the first book printed in the Croatian language (1483).

Also, during the 13th century political and diplomatic texts began to appear. The most important are: Delimitation of Istria (Istarski Razvod) from 1275 and The Code of Vinodol from 1288, both in the Chakavsky dialect. Shtokavsky dialect literature, based on original Chakavsky texts of religious provenance (missals, breviaries, prayer books) appeared almost a century later. The most important vernacular text in Shtokavski is the Croatian Vatican Prayer Book (c. 1400).

Both the language used in legal texts and that used in Glagolitic literature gradually fell under the influence of the vernacular, which considerably affected their phonological, morphological, and lexical systems. From secular and religious songs of the XIV and XV, on church festivals they were composed in the vernacular. Writers of early Croatian religious poetry (začinjavci), translators and editors gradually introduced the vernacular into their works. These začinjavci were the forerunners of the rich literary production of the XV and XVI. The language of religious poems, translations, miracle and morality plays contributed to the popular character of medieval Croatian literature.

Modern language and standardization

Although the first purely vernacular texts in a different Croatian from Church Slavonic date from the 13th century, it is in the centuries XIV and XV when the modern Croatian language (recorded in texts as Vatican Croatian Prayer Book from 1400) emerged in form (morphology, phonology and syntax) that differs only slightly from contemporary Croatian standard language. In Bartolomeo Kašić's manuscript Bible translation, the standardization of the Croatian language can be traced back to the first Illyrian dictionary (Faust Verancius: Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europae Linguarum-Latinae, Italicae, Germanicae, Dalmatiae et Ungaricae, Venice 1595) and the first Croatian grammar (Bartolomeo Kašić: Institutionum Languages illyricae libri duet, Rome 1604). The language of Kašić's translation of the Jesuit Bible (Old and New Testament, 1622-1636; unpublished until 2000) in the Shtokavo-Ijekavo dialect (the ornate style of the Renaissance literature of the Republic of Ragusa) is as close to contemporary standard language (spelling aside) as linguists of the XIX took the great Republic as a model to standardize said language.

This period, sometimes called “Baroque Slavism” was crucial in the formation of the literary language that gave it the strength to become the flowering and witness of a centuries-dormant Croatian nationalism, as well as the standard Croatian referent of the language, and recognized in more than three studies as one of the precursors that helped shape the modern Croatian language. One of the most important linguistic works was that of the Jesuit philologists Bartolomeo Kašić and Giacomo Micaglia; The other energetic literary activity was that of the Franciscan friar of Bosnian origin Mateo Divković, who did the translation of the writings of the Contador Reformation (folk tales from the Bible, sermons and polemics), and that in their adaptations they contained extensive passages in Croatian, in Bosnian, and in turn counting on great adaptation in the previous states, apart from Herzegovina and Croatia; and, last but not least, in the aesthetically refined poetry of Ivan Gundulić (from Republic of Ragusa).

This «triple achievement» of Baroque Slavism for the first half of the XVII century gave the foundation stone on which the resurgence of an Illyrian movement was definitively erected, which later ended in the work of standardizing the language.

The first standard try

In late medieval times up to the 17th century, the main part of semi-autonomous Croatia was ruled by two household dynasties of the princes (bani), Zrinski and Frankopan, who were bound by the inter-union. Around the 17th century the two sought to unify Croatia on the cultural and linguistic level as well, and with great foresight selected as their official language the transitional dialect of Ikavski-Kaikavski, this was an acceptable bad intermediate between all the main Croatian dialects (Chakavski, Kaikavski and Ikavski-Shtokavski); it is so far used in the north of Istra, and in the valleys of the Kupa, Mrežnica and Sutla rivers, and sporadically to other parts in central Croatia as well. This standardized form then became the cultivated language of the elite of administration and intellectuals from the Istra peninsula along the Croatian coast, through central Croatia and up into the northern valleys of the Drava and Mura.

The cultural heyday of this unified standard in the XVII century century is represented by the editions of “the Adrianskog mora sirena ” (Syren from the Adriatic Sea) and the “Putni tovaruš” (traveling accompaniment), these which are in the highest cultural plane of contemporary Europe. However, this first linguistic renaissance in Croatia was halted by the political execution of both dynasties by the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna in 1671. So the Croatian elite in the XVIII century gradually abandoned this combined Croatian standard, and after an Austrian initiative (Vienna, 1850), replaced them by the Neo-Estokavian uniform.

The Illyrian Period

But, due to the unique Croatian linguistic situation, the formal shaping of the Croatian standard language was a process that took nearly four centuries to complete: Croatian is a tongue of three dialects (a rather simplistic way of distinguishing between dialects is to refer to the pronoun what, which is ča, kaj, što in, respectively, čakavian, kajkavian and štokavian dialects) and Glagolitic Cyrillic and Latin script of the three-script language (Croatian/Western/Bosnian, with Latin script as the last winner). The final obstacle to the unified Croatian literary language (based on celebrated vernacular Croatian Troubadour, Renaissance and Baroque—acronym TRB literature) (from c. 1490 to c. 1670) of Dalmatia, Republic of Ragusa and Boka Kotorska was overcome by the Ljudevit Gaj's national standardization of the Croatian awakening of the Latin written norm between the years 1830 and 1850. Gaj and his Illyrian movement (centered in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, of Kajkavian speech) were, however, more political than linguistic. They “chose” štokavian dialect because they had no other choice—realistic štokavian, or, more accurately, neoštokavian (a version of štokavian that emerged in the centuries XV and XVI) was the main Croatian literary language of the XVII.

The main concern of linguists in the 19th century was to achieve a standard and unified spelling and norm; an effort followed for the peculiar Croatian linguistic characteristics that can be described as "passion for neologisms" or vigorous word invention, originating from the uristat nature of the Croatian literary language. One of the peculiarities of the “development trajectory” of the Croatian language is that there is no high figure among Croatian linguists/philologists, because the vernacular infiltrated osmotically into “high culture” via literary works so there was no need. of revolutionary language reforms are enough.

Serbian Connection

The development of the language in the 19th century overlapped with the upheavals that occurred in the Serbian language. It was the reformer Vuk Karadžić, who created an energetic and inventive Serbian language and who made a radical break with the past through the stylization and spelling of the Serbian linguistic folk idiom; Until his activity in the first half of the XIX century, the Serbs had been using the Serbian variant of Church Slavonic and of a hybrid Russo-Slavic language. His "Serbian Dictionary", published in Vienna 1818 (together with the added grammar), was the single most significant work of Serbian literary culture that shaped the profile of the Serbian language (and, the first Serbian dictionary and grammar to date).. After the encouragement of the Austrian bureaucracy which preferred some kind of unified Croatian and Serbian languages for practical administrative reasons, in 1850, the Franco-Slovenian philologist Miklošič initiated a meeting of two Serbian philologists and writers, Vuk Karadžić and Đuro Daničić together with five “Croatian men of letters”: Ivan Mažuranić, Demetrio Demetar, Stjepan Pejaković, Ivan Kukuljević and Vinko Pacel. The Vienna Agreement on the basic features of a unified "Croatian or Serb" or "Serbo-Croatian" language was signed by all eight participants (including Miklošič).

Karadžić's influence on the standard Croatian language was significant, Dubrovnik philologists and linguists such as Pero Budmani, Josip Cobenzl, Milan Resetar, took Vukonian reforms and transferred them to school classrooms, especially in some aspects of the grammar and spelling; many other changes from Karadžić were acquired by the Croat, to this day.

Both languages shared the common basis of the Neo-Shtokavian dialect of the South Slavs, but the Vienna agreement had no real effect until a unified standard appeared at the end of the century XIX in which Vuk Karadžić's Croatian sympathizers, known as the Croatian Vukovitas, wrote the first (from the vantage point of the dominant neo-grammar linguistic school) grammars, spellings and modern dictionaries of the language they called Serbo-Croatian (Professor Pero Budmani of Dubrovnik was the first to call it Serbo-Croatian). The monumental grammar authored by pre-eminent fin de siècle Croatian linguist Tomislav Maretić (grammar and stylistics of the Croatian or Serbian language) and dictionary by Broz and Iveković (Croatian dictionary) temporarily set (grammatically, syntactically and lexically) the elastic standard of this hybrid language.

The relationship with the Bosnian and the Montenegrin

The establishment of the Yugoslav state was an important event in Croatian history. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1918-1929) lasted until January 1929, when it was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929-1941), which attempted to use a common language within the supranational Yugoslav ideology as a whole. This meant that Croatian and Serbian were not developed individually, but there was an attempt to forge a language out of the two.

Serbs were by far the largest ethnic group in the kingdom and the resulting forge was a language based on Serbian, which meant Serbianization of the "mixed" language. In the 1920s and 1930s, the lexical, syntactic, orthographic, and morphological features of Serbian were officially prescribed for Croatian textbooks and general communication. This process of "unification" into a Serbo-Croatian language was preferred by Croatian neo-grammarian linguists, the most notable example being the influential philologist and translator Tomislav Maretić. However, this school was virtually extinct by the late 1920s and the most influential Croatian linguists since then (such as Petar Skok, Stjepan Ivšić and Petar Guberina) were unanimous in reaffirming Croatian as a separate language. During the creation of the Croatian Banovina within Yugoslavia in 1939, things began to change. The situation was eased during World War II, with the capitulation of Yugoslavia and the creation of the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), when the fascist leader Ante Pavelić tried to reimpose an older morphological spelling, which preceded Ivan's spelling prescriptions. Broz from 1892.

An official order signed by Pavelić and co-signed by Mile Budak and Milovan Žanić disapproved of all imported words and in August 1941 forbade the use of any foreign words that could be substituted for Croatian neologisms. Not surprisingly, neither Croatian dictionaries nor Croatian grammars were published in this period. In the communist period (1945 to 1990), it was the by-product of communist centralism and “communist internationalism”. Whatever the intentions, the result was the same: the suppression of the basic features that distinguish Croatian from Serbian, in terms of spelling and vocabulary. No Croatian dictionary (apart from the “historical Croatian or Serbian”, conceived in the XIX century) appeared until 1985, when the centralism was on the wane.

In SFR Yugoslavia, the Serbian language and terminology was that of “official” in some areas: the military, diplomacy, Yugoslav federal institutions (various institutes and research centers), state media, and jurisprudence at the federal level. Also, the language in Bosnia and Herzegovina was gradually "Serbized" at all levels of the educational system and the administration of the republic. The only institution that gave importance to the Croatian language was virtually the Zagreb Lexicographical Institute, headed by the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža. This unitary language policy was encouraged by the state.

Despite the declaration of intent of the AVNOJ (the Council of Anti-Fascists for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia) in 1944, which proclaimed the equality of all the languages of Yugoslavia (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian), in practice everything had been induced towards the supremacy of the Serbian language. This was done under the guise of "mutual enrichment" and "unity", hoping that the transitional phase of relatively peaceful life among the people in Yugoslavia would eventually lead to a meltdown into the supranational Yugoslav nation and, indisputably, provide a firm Serbianization.

However, this “supranational engineering” was arguably doomed from the start. The nations that formed the Yugoslav state were formed long before its existence and all unification puts pressure on only poisoned and exacerbated inter-ethnic/national relations, causing the state to become simply ephemeral.

The single most important effort by ruling Yugoslav communist elites to erase the “differences” between Croatian and Serbian - and to impose in practice the Ekavian Serbian language, written in the Latin script, as the “official” language of Yugoslavia - was the so-called "Novi Sad Agreement". In 1954, 25 of the most influential Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin philologists signed the Novi Sad Agreement. A common spelling of Serbo-Croatian or "Croat-Serbian" was compiled in an atmosphere of state repression and fear. There were 18 Serbs and 7 Croats in Novi Sad.

The “agreement” was seen by Croats as a defeat for Croatian cultural heritage. According to the eminent Croatian linguist Ljudevit Jonke, it was imposed on the Croats. The conclusions were formulated according to the goals that had been set beforehand, and the discussion had no important role. 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 Serb imposition did in fact erupt on March 15, 1967.

On that day, nineteen Croatian student institutions and cultural organizations dealing with language and literature (Croatian universities and academies), including the first Croatian writers and linguists (Miroslav Krleža, Radoslav Katičić, Dalibor Brozović and Tomislav Ladan among them) published the “statement concerning the name and status of the Croatian literary language”. In the declaration, they called for the amendment to the constitution expressing two demands:

• The equality of the four literary, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian languages, and therefore the publication of all federal laws and other federal acts in four instead of three languages.
• The use and denomination of the standard language used by Croatians in schools and in all media, as well as in matters relating to the Republic of Croatia.

The statement accuses the federal authorities in Belgrade of imposing Serbian as the official state language and regressing Croatian to the level of a local dialect. Although the “declaration” was condemned by Yugoslav communist authorities as an outburst of “Croat nationalism”, the forced Serbo-Croat unification was essentially halted, and a new status quo remained until the end of communism.

In the decade between the death of Marshal Tito (the 1980s) and after the end of communism, as well as within the framework of the dissolution of the Yugoslav state (1990/1991), the work of the until then sole chief and commander did not they were able to suppress the linguistic cultures and customs of all the variants of Serbo-Croatian that were believed to have disappeared. The studies of the Croatian linguists Brozović, Katičić and Babić; that had been circulating among specialists surreptitiously, or that were printed in light of illegality, these philological publications constituted the basis of current phonetics and textology for the split of current Croatian.

Among many of the monographs and scientific studies seriously carried out, one can point out the works carried out by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in pursuit of the area in charge of linguistics and particularly of syntax, entrusted to Professors Katicić and Babić. These were made between the 1960s and 1970s, and after they became known, they were prohibited before their appearance, and therefore suppressed in every conceivable way by the Yugoslav authorities, within the supposed climate of authoritarianism.

These works, based on studies and field work, plus the various modern theories known surreptitiously (both in linguistics and phonology of structuring, linguistics, graphology and comparative and historical lexicology, transformational grammar and linguistics regional) revised or discarded the oldest "histories of the language", and restored the independence of the Croatian language definitively, reintegrating and reaffirming the characteristics that were claimed as specifically Croatian (in its phonetic, morphological, syntactic, lexical aspects, among others), which had been constantly suppressed in the Yugoslav state, and which finally gave the modern linguistic description and prescription to the Croatian language.

After communism disappeared and after Croatian independence (1991), the situation regarding the Croatian language stabilized. The publication of these studies made a "formal divorce" of the Croatian variant of Serbo-Croatian, and even ended the common linguistic flow between these languages, deviating from the invariable common course advocated by Tito, and finally announced the death of the Serbo-Croat system in use until then. These studies finally had the possibility of being published for further study within the present-day Croatian nation.

No longer under negative political pressures and de-Croatization impositions, Croatian linguists expanded work on various ambitious programs and intensified their studies in current key areas of linguistics: mathematical and corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, acquisition of the language 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 (most representative being the issue of the Institute for Language Croatian and linguistics).

For a curious bystander, probably the most noticeable language feature of Croatian society was the re-Croatization of Croatian in all areas, from phonetics to semantics and (most obviously) in everyday vocabulary. Political ambitions played a key role in the creation of the Serbo-Croatian language. Likewise, politics were once again a crucial agent in dissolving attempts at a unified language.

After the separation

Until the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Croatian was considered to form, along with Serbian and Bosnian, one of the varieties of the Serbo-Croatian language.

After the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cessation of the application of the linguistic agreements between Croatia and Serbia, there has been a lot of insistence, especially on the Croatian side, on the separation of the three languages. The greatest point of agreement that can be reached in this sense is that of admitting that Serbian and Croatian (together with Bosnian) are part of the central-southern Slavic diasystem.

The term Serbo-Croatian was used for most of the 20th century to refer to the common language of Croats and Serbs. This name was used from 1921 until the War in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, generically for the dialects spoken by Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Montenegrins.

With the separation of Yugoslavia and the appearance of the new states, the term “Serbo-Croatian” fell into disuse, except in the field of linguistics. Today, the name of this language is a controversial issue, in which history and politics have a lot to do with it.

Dialects

The Croatian language is further subdivided into three dialects: Čakavski, Štokavski and Kajkavski. čakavski is spoken in Istria, the Kvarner (Quarnero) Gulf, the Dalmatian coast and in some regions of central Croatia. štokavski is spoken mainly in Dalmatia and Slavonia, and lastly, kajkavski is spoken in the north and north-west of Croatia; the first being considered the most prestigious and most talked about. The Croatian language is also spoken in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where it constitutionally constitutes one of its national communities.

• Chakaviano (Čakavski)
• Estocavo (Štokavski)
• Kaikaviano (Kajkavski)

Another classification divides the Croatian language into four main variants: ikavski, ekavski, ijekavski and jekavski >. They are not properly dialects, but variants in relation to the evolution of the Proto-Slavic vowel jat.

Examples:

Ikavski: divojka, zvizda, misto, razumit, rika, dil
Ijekavski: djevojka, zvijezda, mjesto, razumjeti, dijel/dijeo

Pronunciation

Most of the Croatian phonemes have a correspondence in Spanish. However, there are some phonemes that are not present in Spanish (although most of them are known through other languages). These sounds are represented by the letters: c, z, š, ž, đ and dž.

Vowels

• A, a: [a]
• E, e: [e]
• I, i: [i]
• Or, or: [or]
• U, u: [u]

In this language, it is also grammatically correct to state that the use of the letter R can sometimes be considered as a vowel.

Consonants

The Croatian language consists of 25 consonants:

• B, b: [b]
• C, c: [ts] as the "z" in zwei (German).
• Č, č: [ ] Like the "ch" of Spanish.
• Ć, ć: [ ] It doesn't have an equivalent in Spanish, but it looks like the "tsh".
• D, d: [d]
• DŽ, dž: [ ] as "j" in judge (English), but the tongue goes to the palate.
• Đ, đ: [ ] as "j" in judge (English), but the tongue goes behind the higher central incisors.
• F, f: [f]
• G, g: [g] is pronounced as g in words. Examples: governing, recording.
• H, h: [x] as the "j" of Spanish.
• J, j: [j] is pronounced as the semiconsonant "y".
• K, k: [k]
• L, l: [l]
• LJ lj: ] like the "ll" of non-Yeist dialects, more clearly, like the phonetic combination "gli" in sbagliare (Italian).
• M, m: [m]
• N, n: [n]
• NJ nj: [ Like the "U."
• P, p: [p]
• R, r: [♥] like the soft "r" of "Light" or "Look." Sometimes it is used as a vowel.
• S, s: [s]
• Š, š: [MINLike the English "sh."
• T, t: [t]
• V, v. ] like the mixture between v + u.
• Z, z: [z] like the English z, approaching the upper and lower teeth and placing the tongue behind, for example, "zero" or "bra".
• Ž, ž:♫] like the French j, similar to the "y" of the Spanish rioplatense, or "zh" used in the English language, for example, "genre".
• i+e=i(j)e.
• r+r=ì.

Grammar

There are seven grammatical cases in Croatian: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental. As in the rest of Slavic languages with a case system, adjectives are declined slightly differently than nouns.

There are three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Within the masculine gender, a distinction is made between animate and non-animate.

There are two grammatical numbers: singular and plural.

Basic vocabulary

• Croatian: Hrvatski (language); hrvat/hrvatica (one person).
• Hi. Bok or Bog
• See you: Doviđenja
• Thank you: Hvala
• Please: Molim
• How are you?: Kako yes?
• How are you?: Kako ste?
• Well: Doubt
• Yes: Da
• No: Ne
• I understand: Razumijem
• I don't understand: Ne razumijem
• What time is it?: Koliko je sati?