Croatian language

Croatian Language is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and 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 contraversial 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. Croatian is written in Gaj's Latin alphabet.

History

Early development

The beginning of the Croatian written language can be traced to the 9th century, when Old Church Slavonic was adopted as the language of theliturgy. This language was gradually adapted to non-liturgical purposes and became known as the Croatian version of Old Slavonic. The two variants of the language, liturgical and non-liturgical, continued to be a part of the Glagolitic service as late as the middle of the 9th century.

Until the end of the 11th century Croatian medieval texts were written in three scripts: Latin, Glagolitic and Croatian Curilic (arvatica, poljčica, poljičica, bosančica/bosanica), and also in three languages: Croatian, Latin and Old Slavonic. The latter developed into what is referred to as the Croatian variant of Church Slavonic between the 12th and 16th centuries.

The most important early monument of Croatian literacy is the Baška tablet from the late 11th century. It is a large stone tablet found in the small church of St. Lucy on the Croatian island of Krk which contains text written mostly in Chakavian, today a dialect of Croatian, and in Croatian angular Glagolitic script. It is also important in the history of the nation as it mentions Zvonimir, the king of Croatia at the time. However, the luxurious and ornate representative texts of Croatian Church Slavonic belong to the later era, when they coexisted with the Croatian vernacular literature. The most notable are the "Missal of Duke Novak" from the Lika region in northwestern Croatia (1368). "Evangel from Reims" (1395, named after the town of its final destination), Hrvoje's Missal from Bosnia and Split in Dalmatia (1404) and the first printed book in Croatian language, the Glagolitic Missale Romanum Glagolitice (1483).

During the 13th century Croatian vernacular texts began to appear, the most important among them being the "Istrian land survey" of 1275 and the "Vinodol Codex" of 1288, both written in the Chakavian dialect.

The Shtokavian dialect literature, based almost exclusively Chakavian original texts of religious provenance (missals, breviares, prayer books) appeared almost a century later. The most important purely Shtokavian vernacular text is the Vatican Croatian Prayer Book (ca. 1400).

Both the language used in legal texts and that used in Glagolitic literature gradually came under the influence of the vernacular, which considerably affected its phonological, morphological and lexical systems. From the 14th and the 15th centuries, both secular and religious songs at church festivals 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 15th and 16th centuries. The language of religious poems, translations, miracle and morality plays contributed to the popular character of medieval Croatian literature.

Modern language and standardization

The first purely vernacular texts in Croatian date back to the 13th century (e.g. the Vatican Croatian Prayer Book from 1400) and are distinctly different from Church Slavonic. In the 14th and 15th centuries the modern Croatian language emerged, with morphology, phonology and syntax only slightly differ from the contemporary Croatian standard language

The standardization of the Croatian language can be traced back to the first Croatian dictionary written by Faust Vrančić (Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europae linguarum—Latinae, Italicae, Germanicae, Dalmatiae et Ungaricae, Venice 1595), and to the first Croatian grammar written by Bartul Kašić (Institutionum linguae illyricae libri duo, Rome 1604).

Jesuit Kašić's translation of the Bible (Old and New Testament, 1622–1636; unpublished until 2000), written in the ornate Shtokavian-Ijekavian dialect of the Dubrov

nik Renaissance literature is, despite orthographical differences, as close to the contemporary standard Croatian language as are the French of Montaigne's "Essays" or the English of the King James Bible to their respective successors—the modern standard languages.

This period, sometimes called "Baroque Slavism", was crucial in the formation of the literary idiom that was to become the Croatian standard language. The 17th century witnessed three developments that shaped modern Croatian:

The linguistic works of Jesuit philologists Kašić and Mikalja;
The literary activity of Bosnian Franciscan Matija Divković whose Counter- Reformation writings, comprising popular tales from the Bible, sermons and polemics, were widespread among Croats both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia;
The poetry of Ivan Gundulić from Dubrovnik.

This "triple achievement" of Baroque Slavism in the first half of the 17th century laid the firm foundation upon which the later Ilirian movement completed the work of language standardization.

First attempts at standardization

In the late medieval period up to the 17th century, the majority of semi-autonomous Croatia was ruled by two domestic dynasties of princes (banovi), the Zrinski and the Francopan, which were linked by inter-marriage. Toward the 17th century, both of them attempted to unify Croatia both culturally and linguistically, selecting as their official language the transitional

Ikavian-Kajkavian dialect, this being an acceptable dialect intermediate between all the principal Croatian dialects (Chakavian, Kajkavian and Shtokavian); it is still used now in northern Istria, and in the valleys of the Kupa, Mrežnica and Sutla rivers, and sporadically elsewhere in central Croatia also.

This standardised form became the cultivated elite language of administration and intellectuals from the Istrian Peninsula along the Croatian coast, across central Croatia up into the northern valleys of the Drava and the Mura. The cultural apogee of this unified standard in the 17th century is represented by the editions of "Adrianskog mora sirena" ("Syren of Adriatic Sea") and "Putni tovaruš" ("Travelling escort"). 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. Subsequently the Croatian elite in the 18th century gradually abandoned this combined Croatian standard, and after an Austrian initiative of 1850, it was replaced by the uniform Neo-Shtokavian.

Illyrian period

The Illyrian movement was a 19th-century attempt to forge a common South Slavic language, which in the end only succeeded in uniting the Croats and Serbs. Croatian itself had three major dialects, and there had been several literary languages over four centuries. Croatian nationalist Ljudevit Gaj standardized the Latin alphabet in 1830–1850. Although based in Kajkavian-speaking Zagreb, Gaj supported using the more populous Neo-Shtokavian, a version of Shtokavian which emerged in the 15th and 16th century and became the main Croatian and Serbian literary language from the 18th century on, as the common literary standard for Croatian and Serbian. This was agreed at the Vienna Literary Aggreement of 1850. The 19th century linguists' and lexicographers' main concern was to achieve a more consistent and unified written norm and orthography, which led to a "passion for neologism" or vigorous word coinage originating from the purist nature of Croatian literary language, which was not shared by Serbian.

Sounds

Croatian orthography does not mark vowel length or pitch accent. Otherwise, it is largely phonemic.

Grammar

Croatian, like most other Slavic languages, has a rich system of inflection. Pronouns, nouns, adjectives and some numerals declin (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.

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