Croatian Language

Overview

The Croatian language (Croatian: hrvatski jezik) is a language of the western group of South Slavic languages which is used primarily by the Croats. It is one of the standard versions of the Central-South Slavic diasystem.

Croatian is based on the Ijekavian pronunciation of Štokavian dialect (with some influence from Čakavian and Kajkavian) and written with the Croatian alphabet.

The modern Croatian standard language is a continuous outgrowth of more than nine hundred years of literature written in a mixture of Croatian Church Slavonic and the vernacular language. If the subject is narrowed out, Croatian Church Slavonic had been abandoned by the mid-1400s, and Croatian "purely" vernacular literature has existed for more than five centuries.