Is Croatian slavic?
Slavs
Standardised Slavic languages that have official status in at least one country are: Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, and Ukrainian.
Serbo-Croatian
Croatian is the official language of Croatia, while Serbian is also official in municipalities with significant Serb population.
Hrvat
Hrvat means Croat in South-Slavic languages and refers to a nation and ethnic group, but may also refer to:
Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian (; / also called Serbo-Croat , Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), or Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS)) is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties.
Demographics of Croatia
Croatian replaced Latin as the official language of the Croatian government in 1847. The Croatian lect is generally viewed as one of the three standard varieties of the Shtokavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language. Croatian is written using the Latin alphabet and there are three major dialects spoken on the territory of Croatia, with the Shtokavian idiom used as the literary standard. The Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects are distinguished by their lexicon, phonology, and syntax.
Dialects of Serbo-Croatian
The language was preserved until today only in the aforementioned three villages, although several villages in Molise and Abruzzo region are aware of their Slavic and Croat ancestry. The existence of this Croat colony was unknown outside Italy until 1855 when Medo Pucić, a linguist from Dubrovnik, during one of his journeys in Italy overheard a tailor in Naples speaking with his wife in a language very similar to Pucić's own. The tailor then told him that he came from the village of Kruč, then part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Subsequently, the "Gajica", the modern Croatian alphabet, was adopted to the language.
Literary language
Slavonic-Serbian ("slavenosrpski") was the literary language of Serbs in the Habsburg Monarchy used from the mid-18th century to 1825. It was a linguistic blend of Church Slavonic of the Russian recension, vernacular Serbian (Štokavian dialect), and Russian. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was severely attacked by Vuk Karadžić and his followers, whose reformatory efforts formed modern literary Serbian based on the popular language, known as Serbo-Croatian.
Šokci
Šokci (, , ) are an ethnographic group of South Slavs mainly identified as Croats. They are not considered a separate ethnicity in Croatia and elsewhere. They live in various settlements along the Danube and Sava rivers in the historic regions of Slavonia, Baranya, Syrmia and western Bačka. These regions today span eastern Croatia, southeastern Hungary, and northern Serbia. Šokci are considered natives in Slavonia and Syrmia in Croatia.
History of the Slavic languages
The Slavic languages are generally divided into East Slavic, South Slavic and West Slavic. For most comparative purposes, however, South Slavic does not function as a unit. Bulgarian and Macedonian, while quite similar to each other, are radically different from the other South Slavic languages in phonology and grammar. The phonology of Bulgarian and Macedonian is similar to East Slavic rather than their nearest Slavic neighbor Serbo-Croatian (suggesting an early East–West divide across the whole Slavic territory, before the incursion of Hungarian and Romanian speakers). In grammar, Bulgarian and Macedonian have developed distinctly from all other Slavic languages, eliminating nearly all case distinctions (strongly preserved elsewhere), but preserving and even strengthening the older Indo-European aspectual system consisting of synthetic aorist and imperfect tenses (largely eliminated elsewhere in favor of the new Slavic aspectual system).
Genetic studies on Croats
According to 2014 autosomal analysis of Western Balkan, the Croatian population shows genetic uniformity with other South Slavic populations. The Croatians and Bosnians were more close to East European populations and largely overlapped with Hungarians from Central Europe. In the 2015 analysis, they formed a western South Slavic cluster with the Bosnians and Slovenians in comparison to eastern cluster formed by Macedonians and Bulgarians with Serbians in the middle. The western cluster has an inclination toward Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks, while the eastern cluster toward Romanians and some extent Greeks. In the 2018 analysis of Slovenian population, the Croatian population again clustered with Slovenians, Hungarians and was close to Czech. The population of Croatia mostly shares common ancestry with Eastern, Western, and Southern Europeans, and has almost no relation to isolated Sardinian and Basque population.
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages are divided intro three subgroups: East, West, and South, which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group) and Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian (of the South group).
South Slavs
East:
The Serbo-Croatian varieties have strong structural unity, and are regarded by most linguists as constituting one language. Today, language secessionism has led to several standards: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, although the latter has historically and traditionally been called Serbian and is still undergoing standardization. Bosnian was officially established in 1996. These Serbo-Croatian standards are all based on the Shtokavian dialect group. Other dialect groups, which have lower intelligibility with Shtokavian, are Chakavian in Dalmatia and Kajkavian in Croatia proper. The dominance of Shtokavian in the Western Balkans is due to historical westward migration during the Ottoman period. Slovene is grouped into South Slavic, but has many features shared with West Slavic languages. The Prekmurje Slovene and Kajkavian are especially close, and there is no clear delineation between them. In southeastern Serbia, dialects enter a transitional zone with Bulgarian and Macedonian, with features of both groups, and is commonly called Torlakian.
Demographics of Croatia
The Croatian language is the official language of Croatia, and one of 24 official languages of the European Union since 2013. Minority languages are in official use in local government units where more than a third of the population consists of national minorities or where local legislation mandates their use. These languages are Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Ruthenian, Serbian and Slovak. According to the 2011 Census, 95.60% of citizens of Croatia declared Croatian as their native language, 1.23% declared Serbian as their native language, while no other language is represented in Croatia by more than 0.5% of native speakers among the population of Croatia.
South Slavic languages
Kajkavian is mostly spoken in northern and northwest Croatia, including one-third of the country near the Hungarian and Slovenian borders—chiefly around the towns of Zagreb, Varaždin, Čakovec, Koprivnica, Petrinja, Delnice and so on. Its reflex of "yat" is primarily , rarely diphthongal "ije"). This differs from that of the Ekavian accent; many Kajkavian dialects distinguish a closed "e"—nearly "ae" (from "yat")—and an open "e" (from the original "e"). It lacks several palatals "(ć, lj, nj, dž)" found in the Shtokavian dialect, and has some loanwords from the nearby Slovene dialects and German (chiefly in towns).
Serbian language in Croatia
The Serbian language is one of the officially recognized minority languages in Croatia. It is primarily used by the Serbs of Croatia. The Croatian Constitution, Croatian Constitutional law on national minorities rights, Law on Education in language and script of national minorities and Law on Use of Languages and Scripts of National Minorities define the public co-official usage of Serbian in Croatia. Serbian and Croatian are two standardized varieties of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language. Majority of Serbs of Croatia use Ijekavian pronunciation of Proto-Slavic vowel jat except in the Podunavlje region in Vukovar-Srijem and Osijek-Baranja Counties where local Serb population use Ekavian pronunciation. Post-World War II and Croatian War of Independence settlers in Podunavlje which have come from Bosnia, Dalmatia or Western Slavonia either use their original Ijekavian pronunciation, adopted Ekavian pronunciation or both of them depending on context. In 2011 Census majority of Serbs of Croatia declared Croatian standardized variety as their first language with Ijekavian pronunciation always being required standard form in Croatian. While Serbian variety recognizes both pronunciations as standard Ekavian is the more common one as it is the dominant one in Serbia, with Ijekavian being mostly limited to Republika Srpska in Bosnia, Montenegro and Croatia.
Slavic
Slavic, Slav or Slavonic may refer to:
Slovenes of Croatia
Slovenes of Croatia (, ) are one of 22 national minorities in Croatia. According to 2011 census, there were 10,517 Slovenes in Croatia, with majority (approximately 60%) living in only three counties Istria County, Primorje-Gorski Kotar County and consolidated city-county Zagreb.
Croatian studies
Croatian studies (Croatian: "Kroatistika", German: "Kroatistik", Polish: "Kroatystyka") is an academic discipline within Slavic studies which is concerned with the study of Croatian language, literature, history and culture. Within Slavic studies it belongs to the South Slavic subgroup.
Dialects of Serbo-Croatian
Kajkavian is spoken in North Croatia, including the capital Zagreb, as well as in a few enclaves in Austria, Hungary, and Romania. Though its speakers are ethnic Croats and Kajkavian is thus generally considered a dialect of Serbo-Croatian, it is closer to neighboring Slovene than it is to Chakavian or Shtokavian. The Kajkavian area of Croatia is bordered on the northwest by Slovene language territory. It is bordered on the east and southeast by Shtokavian dialects roughly along a line that was the former division between Civil Croatia and the Habsburg Military Frontier; in southwest along Kupa and Dobra rivers, it persisted in ancient (medieval) contact with Chakavian dialects.
Bosniaks
Bosniaks speak the Bosnian language, a South Slavic language of the Western South Slavic subgroup. Standard Bosnian is considered a variety of "Serbo-Croatian", as mutually intelligible with the Croatian and Serbian languages (see Differences in standard Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) which are all based on the Shtokavian dialect. As such, "Serbo-Croatian" is an arbitrary term applied to a language spoken by several ethnic groups, including the Bosniaks, and is for various reasons controversial for native speakers who do not use the term. As result, paraphrases such as "Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB)" or "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS)" tend to be used in English on occasion.
Vlachs in the history of Croatia
In Serbian historiography all Dinaric/Shtokavian cultural attributes were without exception proclaimed as being Serb, and also often stressed the ethno-demographic discontinuity wanting to prove that the Croatian Military Frontier lost its original Croat population and received a new, ethnically Serb majority population, and also downplayed Croat and overemphasized the importance of the Serbs in the history of the Military Frontier. Serbian historiography strongly considered that the term Vlach indicated status and not ethnos, and that they didn't exist in later centuries as an ethnic group, yet were true Serbs. Sima Ćirković noted that the name was maintained due to different crafts, way of life and distinct form of social organization, until the differences lost their meaning, with Slavicization process lasting for centuries; he considered that Serbs absorbed many Vlachs and other ethnic groups. Many Serbian scholars, including foreign, claim that the settlers in the Military Frontier were Serbs or mainly Serbs.
Indo-European migrations
Present-day Slavic people are classified into East Slavic (chiefly Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians), West Slavic (chiefly Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Wends and Sorbs), and South Slavic (chiefly Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Goranis, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes). For a more comprehensive list, see the ethnocultural subdivisions.
Frano Supilo
On the major playground, Supilo becomes a supporter of a softer Yugoslavian unitarism (because of which he was often demonised in Croatian circles). Supilo's opinion (which was then shared by a large portion of Croatian and Serbian intelligence) had been that Croats and Serbs (to which he later added Slovenes as well) are one three - tribal people - therefore, not three tribes, even less three nations, but one Yugoslavian nation with three names. That, from the modern perspective an unusual idea, was a sign of the late national crystallisation on the Croatian side (in less parts Serbs and Slovenes - not to mention Macedonians and Montenegrins), as well as the territorial bubbles of Serbs and Croats, together with the fact Croatian and Serbian traditional languages have been exquisitely similar and inter - understandable on the conversational level. Practically, this has meant the creation of the Croato-Serb coalition, a creation by which the Serbs are recognised, de facto, as political people inside of Croatia, for the first time in history.
Demographic history of Croatian Baranja
(*) Total number of speakers of South Slavic languages (Serbian, Croatian, and Šokac) in Croatian Baranja can be estimated at around 15,000 (29.6%).
Serbo-Croatian
The Croatian Latin alphabet ("Gajica") followed suit shortly afterwards, when Ljudevit Gaj defined it as standard Latin with five extra letters that had diacritics, apparently borrowing much from Czech, but also from Polish, and inventing the unique digraphs "lj", "nj" and "dž". These digraphs are represented as "ļ, ń and ǵ" respectively in the "Rječnik hrvatskog ili srpskog jezika", published by the former Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb. The latter digraphs, however, are unused in the literary standard of the language. All in all, this makes Serbo-Croatian the only Slavic language to officially use both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, albeit the Latin version is more commonly used.
Banovci, Vukovar-Srijem County
Due to the fact that Serbs of Croatia constitute majority population in the village, the Nijemci Municipality allows the equal official use not only of Croatian language, but the Serbian language and Serbian Cyrillic alphabet as well.
Slovaks of Croatia
Towns:Municipalities:Villages:, Slovak language is officially used in one municipality and one other settlement in Croatia, according to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
History of Croatia
On 25 July 1990, a Serbian Assembly was established in Srb, north of Knin, as the political representation of the Serbian people in Croatia. The Serbian Assembly declared "sovereignty and autonomy of the Serb people in Croatia". Their position was that if Croatia could secede from Yugoslavia, then the Serbs could secede from Croatia. Milan Babić, a dentist from the southern town of Knin, was elected president. The rebel Croatian Serbs established a number of paramilitary militias under the leadership of Milan Martić, the police chief in Knin.
Vlachs in the history of Croatia
However, despite this cross-pollination of language some groups of Vlachs may have remained distinct from the Slavs; historical sources from the 14th-15th century differ Slavs and Vlachs in the area of Kotor, Dubrovnik, Bosnia and Croatia ("Slavi et Vlachy", "Vlachy et Bosgniani", "Serbi et Vlachi"). In 1345, in Cetina "Croati et Olachy" are differed, while in a 1436 document, Catholic Vlachs of the county of Cetina (around the town of Sinj) were represented as distinct from both the Croats and the Serbs inhabiting the county. In 1450, in the area of Šibenik were differed "Morlachi ac Hervati". In a book by Ragusan historian Ludovik Crijević (1459-1527), "Writings on the Present Age", Vlachs ("Valachos") were distinguished from other people, and were mentioned as "nomadic Illyrians who in the common language are called Vlachs" and there is also the mention of the present-day surname Kožul/lj in "Cossuli, a kind of Illyrian people considered Romans". During the Orthodox migration to Žumberak in 1538, general commander Nikola Jurišić mentioned the Vlachs who "in our parts are called as Old Romans" separate from the Serbs and Rascians.
Serbs of Croatia
Serbian language is officially used in 23 cities and municipalities in Croatia.
In April 2015 United Nations Human Rights Committee has urged Croatia to ensure the right of minorities to use their language and alphabet. Committee report stated that particularly concerns the use of Serbian Cyrillic in the town of Vukovar and municipalities concerned. Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dačić said that his country welcomes the UN Human Rights Committee's report.
Origin hypotheses of the Croats
The Slavic, also known as Pan-Slavic and Autochthonous-Slavic theory, dates back to the Croatian Renaissance, when was supported by Vinko Pribojević and Juraj Šižgorić. There's no doubt that Croatian language belongs to the Slavic languages, but they considered that Slavs were autochthonous in Illyricum and their ancestors were old Illyrians. It developed among the Dalmatian humanists, and was also considered by early modern writers, like Matija Petar Katančić, Mavro Orbini and Pavao Ritter Vitezović. This cultural and romanticist idea was especially promoted by the national Illyrian Movement and their leader Ljudevit Gaj in the 19th century.
Horvat
Horvat is the most frequent surname in Croatia and Slovakia, 2nd most frequent in Slovenia and 5th most frequent surname in Hungary. 
The surname originates in Croatia, Horvat being the older version of the word "Hrvat", an autonym used by Croats. In Croatia, majority of Croats with surname Horvat live in the Kajkavian dialect region in Croatia proper. According to the 2011 census, it's the most common last name in the city of Zagreb, Zagreb County Krapina-Zagorje County, Varaždin County, Koprivnica-Križevci County, Bjelovar-Bilogora County, Virovitica-Podravina County and Virovitica-Podravina County. Apart from them, there is a certain number of ethnic Serbs with surname Horvat inside Baranja region of Croatia. Almost half of the citizens of Slovenia that have the surname Horvat live in the Prekmurje region, where it is the most common surname by far. It is also common in Lower Styria and in Ljubljana, while it is very rare in western Slovenia.
Anti-Slavic sentiment
To deviate from ideological theories for strategic reasons by forging alliances with Croatia (a puppet state created after the invasion of Yugoslavia) and Bulgaria, the Croats were officially described as being "more Germanic than Slav", a notion supported by Croatia's fascist dictator Ante Pavelić who maintained the view that the "Croatians were the descendants of the ancient Goths" who "had the Panslav idea forced upon them as something artificial". However the Nazi regime continued to classify the Croats as "subhumans" despite its alliance with them. Hitler also deemed the Bulgarians to be "Turkoman" in origin.Notes
Further reading
Croatian language
Besides the Shtokavian dialect, on which Standard Croatian is based, there are two other main dialects spoken on the territory of Croatia, Chakavian and Kajkavian. These dialects, and the four national standards, are usually subsumed under the term "Serbo-Croatian" in English, though this term is controversial for native speakers, and paraphrases such as "Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian" are therefore sometimes used instead, especially in diplomatic circles.
Croatian name
Upon the Croatian populace's arrival on what is currently modern-day continental Croatia in the early 7th century, Croats used Slavic names and corresponding naming customs. With modernization and globalization in the last century, given names and surnames have expanded past typical Slavic traditionalism and have included borrowed names from all over the world. However, although given names vary from region to region in Croatia and can be heavily influenced by other countries' names, surnames tend to be Slavic. Croatian names usually, but not always, consist of a given name, followed by a family name; however certain names follow naming customs that diverge from the norm. Naming customs have been a part of Croatian culture for over 400 years.
Origin hypotheses of the Croats
With the development of Croatian historiography, since the 17th century, the Slavic theory was elaborated in more realistic terms, and considered Croats as one of the Slavic groups which settled in their modern-day homeland during the migration period. Constantine the VII's work was particularly researched by the 17th century historian Ivan Lučić, who concluded that the Croats came from White Croatia on the other side of the Carpathian mountains, in "Sarmatia" (Poland), with which historians today agree upon. The autochthonous idea, that the Slavs came to Illyricum from Poland is of even older origin (12th century).
Serbs
Serbian is an official language in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and is a recognized minority language in Montenegro (although spoken by a plurality of population), Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia. Older forms of literary Serbian are Church Slavonic of the Serbian recension, which is still used for ecclesiastical purposes, and Slavonic-Serbian—a mixture of Serbian, Church Slavonic and Russian used from mid-18th century to the first decades of the 19th century.
Slavic languages
The tripartite division of the Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. Of these, certain so-called transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by the Rusyn language/dialect of Eastern Slovakia and Western Ukraine. Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language.
Vlachs in the history of Croatia
The meaning of the term "Vlach" within the territory of present-day Croatia (like Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia) differed over time and had multiple meanings. In the Middle Ages it was primarily an exonym that referred to Romance-speaking pastoralist communities in the mountains, or rarely other Romance-speaking people like Italians. Due to their specific lifestyle, the term acquired a social-professional (shepherds) connotation. In the 13th and 14th centuries the shepherds of the Balkans were called Vlachs ("Vlasi"), including Slavic-speakers. Initially it was used for shepherds and transporters in the hinterland regardless of ethnicity and religion (though often Romance-speaking), strangers and newcomers as opposed to natives (in Istria, for speakers with Shtokavian traits), for hinterlanders by Dalmatian island inhabitants, for rugged villagers by the townspeople, and later an Orthodox Christian (with time mostly identified with Serbs). From the 16th century, with the Ottoman conquest and mass migrations of Slavic-speaking people, the term "Vlach" was primarily used for a socio-cultural and professional segment of the population, rather than to an ethnicity.
South Slavs
The South Slavs are known in Serbian, Macedonian and Montenegrin as "Južni Sloveni" (); in Bulgarian as "Yuzhni Slavyani" (); in Croatian and Bosnian as "Južni Slaveni"; in Slovene as "Južni Slovani". The Slavic root "*jugъ" means "south". The Slavic ethnonym itself was used by 6th-century writers to describe the southern group of Early Slavs (the "Sclaveni"); West Slavs were called "Veneti" and East Slavs "Antes". The South Slavs are also called "Balkan Slavs", although this term does not encompass the Slovenes.
Slavic languages
The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non-Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed the geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria (Moravians) and those in present-day Styria, Carinthia, East Tyrol in Austria, and in the provinces of modern Slovenia, where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonisation.
In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as a part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical classification of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110-word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the standards of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms.
Croatia
The origin of the name is uncertain, but is thought to be a Gothic or Indo-Aryan term assigned to a Slavic tribe. The oldest preserved record of the Croatian ethnonym "*xъrvatъ" is of variable stem, attested in the Baška tablet in style "zvъnъmirъ kralъ xrъvatъskъ" ("Zvonimir, Croatian king").
Slovene language
Slovene is an Indo-European language belonging to the Western subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages, together with Serbo-Croatian. It is close to the Chakavian and especially Kajkavian dialects of Serbo-Croatian, but further from the Shtokavian dialect, the basis for the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standard languages. Furthermore, Slovene shares certain linguistic characteristics with all South Slavic languages, including those of the Eastern subgroup, such as Bulgarian.
Vlachs in the history of Croatia
Socioculturally, there were two main ethnic divisions in the Croatian Military Frontier, those of the "native" "Croats" and "immigrant" "Vlachs". The Croats were Catholics, Habsburg subjects, made up of an agrarian population concentrated around frontier towns, of nuclear families, and linguistically predominantly Chakavian-speaking (or Chakavian-based speech). The Vlachs were holders of patriarchal-pastoral culture of the Dinaric, refugees from Ottoman and Venetian territories, of extended families, and linguistically Neo-Shtokavian-speaking.
Slavs
Slavs are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group who speak the various Slavic languages of the larger Balto-Slavic linguistic group. They are native to Eurasia, stretching from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe all the way north and eastwards to Northeast Europe, Northern Asia (Siberia), the Caucasus, and Central Asia (especially Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) as well as historically in Western Europe (particularly in East Germany) and Western Asia (including Anatolia). From the early 6th century they spread to inhabit the majority of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Today, there is a large Slavic diaspora throughout North America, particularly in the United States and Canada as a result of immigration.
Slavic Christianity
Slavic Christianity refers to the history of Christianity among the Slavic peoples. The Slavic nations (or ethnic groups) are divided between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. The Orthodox Slavs use the Cyrillic script, while the Catholic Slavs use the Latin script. It should be noted that Orthodox Slavs used Slavic language for liturgy from 863, while Catholic Slavs (like other Catholics) - only since the Counter-Reformation.
Vlachs in the history of Croatia
Many scholars consider that the "Vlachs" since the 16th century referred to pastoralists (social status) being a common name for Serbs and other Slavs in the Ottoman Empire and later. Tihomir Đorđević considered that the Vlach didn't only refer to genuine Vlachs or Serbs but also to cattle breeders in general. Bogumil Hrabak emphasized that not all cattle breeders and shepherds in the Balkans were called Vlachs, an example being the Arbanasi. Another view, as held by Croatian-Albanian Zef Mirdita, is that there was a clear distinction between the Serb ethnic community and the Vlachs as seen in Serbian medieval documents mentioning "Vlachs" separately from "Serbs", and for example the prohibition of intermarriage between Serbs and Vlachs by Emperor Stefan Dušan (in "Dušan's Code"). However, as noted by John V. A. Fine Jr., "a more detailed examination of the code shows that it was in fact occupational". Mirdita and other scholars noted that the Vlachs were always mentioned as an ethnic group, and were in the process of Slavicization which wasn't completed in the 15th century.
Vlachs in the history of Croatia
While the Slavic communities managed to form national identities founding regional provinces and kingdoms, Romance-speaking Vlachs didn't manage to form a national identity and were prone to assimilation. However, even if they were prone to national, linguistical and cultural assimilation with the Slavs, they did contribute to their respective communities. The problems the Vlachs faced with the creation of the national identity did not differ very much from what other rural communities face. Rural people comprised the majority of the population in the Middle Ages, and the centuries of war, conquest, regional boundaries, migrations, religious conversions, cultural blending and socio-economic problems affected the belonging of a population to a specific South Slavic national group. The regions of Lika (which mostly involved the Croatian Military Frontier) and Dalmatia were the border area between Habsburg, Ottoman and Venetian empires, a place of mass migrations and mixing of communities.
Croat Muslims
Croats are a South Slavic people. According to the published data from the 2011 Croatian census, 9,647 Muslims in Croatia declared themselves as ethnic Croats.
The Islamic Community of Croatia is officially recognized by the state. After World War II, thousands of Croats (even those with the Islamic faith) who supported the Ustaše fled as political refugees to countries such as Canada, Australia, Germany, South America and Islamic countries. The descendants of those Muslim Croats established their Croatian Islamic Centre in Australia in 36 Studley St. Maidstone, Victoria and the Croatian Mosque in Toronto, headed by Mr. Kerim Reis.
Slovaks of Croatia
Several notable Croatians are of Slovak descent including philologist cardinal Juraj Haulik, Bogoslav Šulek and writer August Šenoa.
Croatian linguistic purism
Croatian literature across the centuries is argued to demonstrate a tendency to cherish Slavic words and word coinage, and to expel "foreign" borrowings. Croatian philologist Zlatko Vince articulates this tendency as follows:
Croatian literature even in the old ages tends to stay away from barbarisms and foreign words, a certain conscious care in the works of literature is felt when it comes to language selection. In the course of centuries hence the tendency is formed for literary language to be as much as pure and selective as possible. One thing is the colloquial language, often ridden with foreign words, and entirely different thing is the language of literary works in which tendency for language purity arises. The way and the extent to which that need could be satisfied is different in various periods, but the tendency for as pure and selective language can be noted even in Old Dubrovnik writers, and in Vitezović. All the way to pre-Illyrian and Illyrian efforts and by the end of the XIX. century, when the osmotic influence of traditional Croatian literary heritage does not cease to stop...That care of language purity which characterizes Croatian literary expression even in the XIX. century, remains immanent in later periods...Literary language of the Croats is in fact organic continuation of older state of affairs in Croatian literature.
In a session regarding the issue of the usage for foreign words in Croatian language, as well on the problems of ongoing projects of coining Slavic replacements for established technical terms by combined efforts of linguists and specialists, the now defunct institution for the standardization of Croatian language—the Council for Standard Croatian Language Norm—has presented the historical overview of the issue as follows:
The attitude towards foreign words in Croatian literary language is multi-dimensional in many respects. The origin of Croatian language culture, when writing in Slavic, is determined by the tradition of Church Slavonic literature. Originating from copies of Ancient Greek liturgical texts, it places a distinct emphasis to Slavic expressive devices, and only exceptionally non-Slavic words are being borrowed. That tendency has been continued in Croatian language culture to this day. The usage of Croatian words, if necessary even in a modified meaning, or Croatian coinages, if they're considered to be successful, represents higher merit then mere mechanical borrowing of foreign expressive devices. That way the Croatian word is more solemn and formal ("glazba", "mirovina", "redarstvenik"), and the loanword is more relaxing and less demanding ("muzika", "penzija", "policajac"). This dimension of purism is incorporated into the very foundations of Croatian language sensitivity.
The Illyrian movement and its successor, the Zagreb Philological School, have been particularly successful in creating the corpus of Croatian terminology that covered virtually all areas of modern civilization. This was especially visible in two fundamental works: Ivan Mažuranić's and Josip Užarević's: "German-Croatian dictionary" from 1842 and Bogoslav Šulek's "German-Croatian-Italian dictionary of scientific terminology", 1875. These works, particularly Šulek's, systematized (i.e. collected from older dictionaries), invented and coined Croatian terminology for the 19th century jurisprudence, military schools, exact and social sciences, as well as numerous other fields (technology and commodities of urban civilization).
Interslavic language
During the second half of the 19th century Pan-Slavic language projects were mostly the domain of Slovenes and Croats. In this era of awakening national consciousness, the Russians were the only Slavs who had their own state; other Slavic peoples inhabited large, mostly non-Slavic states, and clear borders between the various nations were mostly lacking. Among the numerous efforts at creating written standards for the South Slavic languages there were also efforts at establishing a common South Slavic language, Illyrian, that might also serve as a literary language for all Slavs in the future. Of special importance is the work of Matija Majar (1809–1892), a Slovenian Austroslavist who later converted to Pan-Slavism. In 1865 he published Uzajemni Pravopis Slavjanski ("Mutual Slavic Orthography"). In this work, he postulated that the best way for Slavs to communicate with other Slavs was by taking their own language as a starting point and then modifying it in steps. First, he proposed changing the orthography of each individual language into a generic ("mutual") Pan-Slavic orthography, subsequently he described a grammar that was based on comparing the five major Slavic languages of his days: Old Church Slavonic, Russian, Polish, Czech and Serbian. Apart from a book about the language itself, Majar also used it for a biography of Cyril and Methodius and for a magazine he published in the years 1873–1875, "Slavjan". A fragment in the language can still be seen on the altar of Majar's church in Görtschach. Other Pan-Slavic language projects were published in the same period by the Croatian Matija Ban, the Slovenes Radoslav Razlag and Božidar Raič, as well as the Bulgarian from Macedonia Grigor Parlichev – all based on the idea of combining Old Church Slavonic with elements from the modern South Slavic languages.
Croatian language
Standard Croatian is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian, more specifically on Eastern Herzegovinian, which is also the basis of Standard Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. In the mid-18th century, the first attempts to provide a Croatian literary standard began on the basis of the Neo-Shtokavian dialect that served as a supraregional "lingua franca" pushing back regional Chakavian, Kajkavian, and Shtokavian vernaculars. The decisive role was played by Croatian Vukovians, who cemented the usage of Ijekavian Neo-Shtokavian as the literary standard in the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, in addition to designing a phonological orthography. Croatian is written in Gaj's Latin alphabet.
Dalibor Brozović
Instead of "Serbo-Croatian", Brozović preferred the term "Central South Slavic diasystem", asserting separate language status for Croatian and Serbian. However, Brozović advocated the term "Croato-Serbian" even in 1988. As far as language status is concerned, Brozović has asserted for nearly three decades that "the Serbian and Croatian variants are (...) phenomenons, which are analogous to the English and American variants"; "As in other cases where several nations use one standard language (German, Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese standard language), the standard Croato-Serbian language is not unified. In linguistics (especially in sociolinguistics), the realizations of such standard languages are called "variants of a standard language"". Brozović maintained that it is "a fact that Serbs and Croats have a common language", and he described it as pluricentric even in 1992. In the 1990s, Brozović became one of the leading proponents of linguistic purism in Croatia.
Demographics of South America
Brazil has the largest Slavic population with the number of Poles reaching 3 million people, followed by Ukrainians and Russians but comprising many other nationalities. Argentina following with the second largest number of Slavs, comprises a sizeable Croatian population, although Chile’s Croatian community is the largest outside Croatia.
Demographics of Montenegro
The vast majority (over 90%) of the population of Montenegro is of Slavic origin. Albanians make up 5 percent of the population (4.9% at the 2011 census), while there is also a small Romani minority (0.8% at the 2011 census). The Slavic population of Montenegro uses a large diversity in ethnic identities to describe their ethnicity. During the first decades after WW II most Slavic people identified themselves as Montenegrins, with less than 2% Serbs and less than 2% Croats in 1948. During the last decades of the existence of Yugoslavia up to 5% of the population declared themselves Yugoslavs (South-Slavs). During and after the Yugoslav Wars the ethnic identity of the Serbs (and in general the political influence of Serbia) became increasingly important in Montenegro and at the 2003 census almost one third of the population identified themselves as Serbs. The Serbs live mostly along the borders with Bosnia and Serbia, while the Montenegrins live in the center of the country. The Slavic population are in majority Eastern Orthodox Christians, but there is also a large Muslim minority, like in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although most of the Slavic Muslims in Montenegro initially also identified themselves as Montenegrins, gradually over time more and more Slavic Muslims started to use the term Muslim as an ethnic designation, thus opting for a distinctive ethno-religious identity. After the Yugoslav Wars this changed again and at the 2003 and 2011 census most ethnic Muslims declared themselves Bosniaks, mainly because they had some historical relations with Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina and mostly live in the northeast of Montenegro.
Demographics of Croatia
From 1961 to 1991, the official language was formally designated as Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. Even during socialist rule, Croats often referred to their language as Croato-Serbian (instead of Serbo-Croatian) or as Croatian. Croatian and Serbian variants of the language were not officially recognised as separate at the time, but referred to as the west and east version, and had different alphabets: the Latin alphabet and Serbian Cyrillic. Croatians are protective of their language from foreign influences, as the language was under constant change and threats imposed by previous rulers (i.e. Austrian German, Hungarian, Italian and Turkish words were changed and altered to "Slavic" looking/sounding ones).
Greater Croatia
The foundations of the concept of Greater Croatia are laid in late 17th and early 18th century works of Pavao Ritter Vitezović. He was the first ideologist of Croatian nation who proclaimed that all Slavs are Croats. His works were used to legitimize expansionism of the Habsburg Empire to the east and south by asserting its historical rights to claim Illyria. "Illyria" as Slavic territory projected by Vitezović would eventually incorporate not only most of the Southeastern Europe but also parts of Central Europe such as Hungary. Vitezović defines territory of Croatia which, besides Illyria and all Slavic populated territory, includes all the territory between Adriatic, Black and Baltic seas.
Croats
Curiously enough, the Croats were never obliged to use Latin—rather, they held masses in their own language and used the Glagolitic alphabet. In 1886 it arrived to the Principality of Montenegro, followed by the Kingdom of Serbia in 1914, and the Republic of Czechoslovakia in 1920, but only for feast days of the main patron saints. The 1935 concordat with the Kingdom of Yugoslavia anticipated the introduction of the Church Slavonic for all Croatian regions and throughout the entire state.
Slovaks of Croatia
Slovaks are officially recognized as an autochthonous national minority, and as such, together with the Czechs of Croatia, elect a special representative to the Croatian Parliament.
History of the Slavic languages
Phonemic tone is found only in western South Slavic languages — Serbo-Croatian and some Slovenian dialects (including one of the two literary standards). Phonemic length is found in Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech and Slovak. Phonemic accent is found in Serbo-Croatian, the East Slavic languages, Bulgarian, the northern Kashubian dialects, marginally in Slovenian, and even more marginally in Macedonian.
Bunjevci
Disputes over the national status of the Bunjevci go back to the nationalism wave in the 19th century in Austria-Hungary, but their "national status" remained ambiguous since, as the debate revived by the Breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It has been argued that they are Croats, Serbs, and yet another as a fourth nation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes among the South Slavic nations. In the period between 1920 and 1930 and again in 1940, there were three types of manipulation to neutralize their Croatian nationality, primarily emphasizing their ethnic distinctiveness from both the Croats and Serbs, that can be both Croats and Serbs or it's unimportant because both are Yugoslavs, and open denial of their ethnicity and religious belonging considering that Bunjevci and Šokci are Serbs of the Catholic faith. The third was argued by Serbian academic elite, including Aleksa Ivić, Radivoj Simonović, Jovan Erdeljanović among others, but without proper argumentation and ethnological basis, which also included unsubstantiated claims like that they got Ikavian pronunciation because of Franciscan friars influence.
Demographics of Slovenia
The official language in Slovenia is Slovene, which is a member of the South Slavic language group. In 2002, Slovene was the native language of around 88% of Slovenia's population according to the census, with more than 92% of the Slovenian population speaking it in their home environment. This places Slovenia among the most homogeneous countries in the EU in terms of the share of speakers of predominant mother tongue. Slovene is sometimes characterized as the most diverse Slavic language in terms of dialects, with different degrees of mutual intelligibility. Accounts of the number of dialects range from as few as seven dialects, often considered dialect groups or dialect bases that are further subdivided into as many as 50 dialects. Other sources characterize the number of dialects as nine or eight.
South Slavs
Slovene
Vlachs in the history of Croatia
Some older sources like, Belsazar Hacquet (1739–1815) noted that although some call the Vlachs as Serbs, the Croats are their actual descendants. In the work "About the Vlachs" from 1806, Metropolitan Stevan Stratimirović stated that Roman Catholics from Croatia and Slavonia scornfully used the name Vlach for ""the Slovenians (Slavs) and Serbs, who are of our, Eastern confession (Orthodoxy)"", and that ""the Turks in Bosnia and Serbia also call every Bosnian or Serbian Christian a Vlach"". Scholars like Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Ferdo Šišić, Vjekoslav Klaić, Petar Skok, vaguely argued according to the ideologies of the time, that the Vlachs lacked national consciousness, belonging to Serbs or Croats, that Orthodoxy made them Serbs, or that due to them being mainly Orthodox the Roman Catholic priests started to identify them with the Serbs/Rascians which eventually got adopted.
Juraj Slovinac
In his works, Juraj also lists the eleven Glagolitic bishops in Croatia:In a note on the same page, he claims that Croatian bishops preached in both Latin and Croatian, ‘"Primus episcopus Chrawacie qui scit utrumque ydioma, tam latinum quam chrawaticum, et celebrat missam in altero istorum ydiomatum quocumque sibi placet."’
Yugoslavs
Yugoslavs or Yugoslavians (Serbo-Croatian: "Jugoslaveni/"Југославени, "Jugosloveni/"Југословени; Macedonian: Југословени; Slovene: "Jugoslovani") is a designation that was originally designed to refer to a united South Slavic people. It has been used in two connotations, the first in an ethnic or supra-ethnic connotation, and the second as a term for citizens of the former Yugoslavia. Cultural and political advocates of Yugoslav identity have historically ascribed the identity to be applicable to all people of South Slav heritage, including those of today's Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Attempts at uniting Bulgaria into Yugoslavia were however unsuccessful and therefore Bulgarians were not included in the panethnic identification.
Croats of Slovenia
The number of Slovenian citizens of Croatian origin is difficult to establish. According to the 2001 census, 35,642 of them declared themselves as ethnically ("nationally", according to the Slovenian terminology) Croatian. In the same census, around 54,000 people declared Croatian as their mother tongue. Ten years earlier, more than 52,000 Slovenian citizens declared themselves as ethnically Croatian, while the number of those with Croatian as their mother tongue was around 50,000.
Rajko Igić
He also devised a new script, Slavica, a fused version of the (Cyrillic and Latin alphabet), used by speakers of the predominant southern Slavic languages (Serbo-Croatian). It was a quixotic attempt to mend the linguistic divisions among the Yugoslav ethnic groups, prior to outbreak of widespread [Balkan Wars | conflict].
Minority languages of Croatia
In 2011 there was 11 elementary schools in which students from Slovak minority were able to learn Slovak language. Those schools were located in Ilok, Osijek, Soljani, Josipovac Punitovački, Markovac Našički, Jelisavac, Miljevci, Zdenci, Lipovljani and Međurići. Gymnasium in Požega was the first high school in Croatia to introduce Slovak language education into its elective curriculum. "Union of Slovaks" in cooperation with the "Slovak Cultural Center" in Našice publish magazine Prameň in Slovak language. On the 200th anniversary of birth of Štefan Moyses in 1997 Croatian branch of Matica slovenská set a bilingual memorial plate at the building of the Gornji Grad Gymnasium in Zagreb. In 2003 second bilingual plate commemorating the work of Martin Kukučín was set up in Lipik. Matica slovenská in Zagreb published more than 10 books in Slovak language over the years. In 1998 Central Library of Slovaks in Croatia was established as a section of Public library in Našice and as of 2016 its users had access to more than 4,000 volumes.
Croatian language
Croatian is commonly characterized by the "Ijekavian" pronunciation (see an explanation of yat reflexes), the sole use of the Latin alphabet, and a number of lexical differences in common words that set it apart from standard Serbian. Some differences are absolute, while some appear mainly in the frequency of use.
Serbo-Croatian
On January 15, 1944, the Anti-Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) declared Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, and Macedonian to be equal in the entire territory of Yugoslavia. In 1945 the decision to recognize Croatian and Serbian as separate languages was reversed in favor of a single Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian language. In the Communist-dominated second Yugoslavia, ethnic issues eased to an extent, but the matter of language remained blurred and unresolved.
Untermensch
In order to forge a strategic alliance with the Independent State of Croatia – a puppet state created after the invasion of Yugoslavia – and the Kingdom of Bulgaria, the Nazis deviated from a strict interpretation of their racial ideology, and Croats were officially described as "more Germanic than Slav", a notion supported by Croatia's fascist dictator Ante Pavelić who maintained that the "Croatians were descendants of the ancient Goths" and "had the Panslav idea forced upon them as something artificial". However the Nazi regime continued to classify Croats as a "subhuman" in spite of the alliance. Hitler also deemed the Bulgarians to be "Turkoman" in origin.
Slavic microlanguages
Native speakers of contemporary Slavic microlanguages either live among unrelated linguistic communities, thereby constituting an ethnic "island", or live on the geographical periphery of their historical ethnic group. Correspondingly, these microlanguages can be divided into insular and peripheral categories (the latter of which can also be called "regional languages"). The principal insular forms are: Rusyn, Burgenland Croatian, Molise Croatian, Resian dialect (which may also be characterized as "peninsular") and Banat Bulgarian. The main peripheral forms include Prekmurje Slovene, East Slovak, Lachian, Carpatho-Russian, West Polesian and others.
Croatian literature
Croatian medieval prose was written in two languages: Croatian and Church Slavonic, using three different alphabets, Glagolitic, Latinic and Bosnian Cyrillic. Among these there was some interaction, as evidenced by documents carrying two forms of letters; especially with respect to Glagolitic and Cyrillic texts, and some Latin relied on Glagolitic forms. That interaction makes Croatian writing unique among Slavic prose, and even in European literature. Croatian medieval literature reflects the general trends within European literature, though there were some different traits, for example literature directed at the common people; a strong background tradition of oral literature, blending religious topics and interweaving of genres. A significant part of Croatian early literature is based on translations, with typical Central European edits. Croatian early literature was influenced from two spheres: from the East (Byzantine and Church Slavonic inheritance) and from the West (from Latin, Italian, Franco-Italian and Czech traditions).
From the 14th century, the western influence remained strong in Croatian literature. Recognizing these patterns, Croatian authors, mostly anonymous, adapted their work to the specific needs of the community in which and for which they wrote. Despite their writings being in large part translations, this literature achieved a notably artistic level of language and style. One of the most significant achievements was keeping alive the Church Slavonic literal language (especially in the Glagolitic alphabet). In later periods elements of that language came to be used in expressive ways and as a signal of "high style", incorporating current vernacular words and becoming capable of transferring knowledge on a wide range of subjects, from law and theology, chronicles and scientific texts, to works of literature. Such medieval works in the people's own language are the starting point for the literature of later periods. Anonymous poets and singers, developing their own styles, of typically religious poetry, and of this period, were referred to as the "začinjavci" by later authors and sources.
Yugoslavs
Since the late 18th century, when traditional European ethnic affiliations started to mature into modern ethnic identities, there have been numerous attempts to define a common South Slavic ethnic identity. The word "Yugoslav", meaning "South Slavic", was first used by Josip Juraj Strossmayer in 1849. The first modern iteration of Yugoslavism was the Illyrian movement in Habsburg Croatia. It identified South Slavs with ancient Illyrians and sought to construct a common language based on the Shtokavian dialect. The movement was led by Ljudevit Gaj, whose script became one of two official scripts used for the Serbo-Croatian language.
Serbian language in Croatia
The Law on Use of Languages and Scripts of National Minorities provides for a mandatory co-official use of minority languages in municipalities of Croatia with at least one third of members of ethnic minoritiy. Municipalities Dvor, Gvozd, Jagodnjak, Šodolovci, Borovo, Trpinja, Markušica, Negoslavci, Biskupija, Ervenik, Kistanje, Gračac, Udbina, Vrbovsko, Donji Kukuruzari, Erdut and Vukovar, according to the provisions of law, are obliged to grant equal co-official use of Serbian language and Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. Law enforcement is facing great resistance in the part of the majority population, most notably in the case of Vukovar where it led to 2013 Anti-Cyrillic protests in Croatia.
Sugar Creek Slavic Festival
For many centuries the Slavic tribes used the same common language. Starting with the migration into Eastern Europe some dialectical differences began to develop among the various tribes. Generally, linguists divide the Slavs into three main groups - Western Slavs, Southern or Yugoslavs, and Eastern Slavs. The Western Slavs embrace modern nations of Czechs, Slovaks, Lusitian Serbs and Poles. Southern Slavs include Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Macedonians and Bulgarians. The Eastern Slavs are subdivided into three separate branches: Russians (or Muscovites), White (or Bielo-Russians) and Rusyns (or Ukrainian).
Croatian language
Croatian (; "" ) is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language used by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighboring countries. It is the official and literary standard of Croatia and one of the official languages of the European Union. Croatian is also one of the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a recognized minority language in Serbia, and neighboring countries.
South Slavs
Today, the majority of South Slavs are Orthodox Christians; most Bulgarians, Macedonians, Serbs and Montenegrins are Orthodox Christians. Most Slovenes and Croats are Roman Catholics. Bosniaks, other minor ethnic groups (Gorani, Muslims by nationality) and sub-groups (Torbesh and Pomaks) are Muslims. Some South Slavs are atheist, agnostic and/or non-religious.
The South Slavic languages, one of three branches of the Slavic languages family (the other being West Slavic and East Slavic), form a dialect continuum. It comprises, from west to east, the official languages of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. The South Slavic languages are geographically divided from the rest of the Slavic languages by Germanic (Austria), Hungarian and Romanian.
Croatian language
The Illyrian movement was a 19th-century pan-South Slavic political and cultural movement in Croatia that had the goal to standardize the regionally differentiated and orthographically inconsistent literary languages in Croatia, and finally merge them into a common South Slavic literary language. Specifically, three major groups of dialects were spoken on Croatian territory, and there had been several literary languages over four centuries. The leader of the Illyrian movement Ljudevit Gaj standardized the Latin alphabet in 1830–1850 and worked to bring about a standardized orthography. Although based in Kajkavian-speaking Zagreb, Gaj supported using the more populous Neo-Shtokavian – a version of Shtokavian that eventually became the predominant dialectal basis of both Croatian and Serbian literary language from the 19th century on. Supported by various South Slavic proponents, Neo-Shtokavian was adopted after an Austrian initiative at the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850, laying the foundation for the unified Serbo-Croatian literary language. The uniform Neo-Shtokavian then became common in the Croatian elite.
Croatia–Italy relations
Although stormy at best when parts of Croatia were under direct Italian control during the second world war, today the relations between the two countries can be described as "very friendly", and both countries wish to improve their relations. Along with sharing a historically strong adherence to the Roman Catholic religion, they have various cultural similarities, with Croatia considered the most "Italian" of all the Slavic countries. Italian is a fairly popular foreign language in Croatia, with 15% of Croatians able to speak it well enough to have a conversation, according to Eurobarometer.
Serbo-Croatian phonology
Serbo-Croatian is a South Slavic language with four national standards. The Eastern Herzegovinian Neo-Shtokavian dialect forms the basis for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian (the four national standards).
Croats
Scholars have hypothesized the name Croat ("Hrvat") may be Iranian, thus suggesting that the Croatians were possibly a Sarmatian tribe from the Pontic region who were part of a larger movement at the same time that the Slavs were moving toward the Adriatic. The major basis for this connection was the perceived similarity between "Hrvat" and inscriptions from the Tanais dated to the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, mentioning the name "Khoro(u)athos". Similar arguments have been made for an alleged Gothic-Croat link. Whilst there is indeed possible evidence of population continuity between Gothic and Croatian times in parts of Dalmatia, the idea of a Gothic origin of Croats was more rooted in 20th century Ustaše political aspirations than historical reality.
Slavs
The alphabets used for Slavic languages are frequently connected to the dominant religion among the respective ethnic groups. Orthodox Christians use the Cyrillic alphabet while Roman Catholics use the Latin alphabet; the Bosniaks, who are Muslim, also use the Latin alphabet. Additionally, some Eastern Catholics and Roman Catholics use the Cyrillic alphabet. Serbian and Montenegrin use both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. There is also a Latin script to write in Belarusian, called the Lacinka alphabet.
Serbo-Croatian
The topic of language for writers from Dalmatia and Dubrovnik prior to the 19th century made a distinction only between speakers of Italian or Slavic, since those were the two main groups that inhabited Dalmatian city-states at that time. Whether someone spoke Croatian or Serbian was not an important distinction then, as the two languages were not distinguished by most speakers. This has been used as an argument to state that Croatian literature Croatian per se, but also includes Serbian and other languages that are part of Serbo-Croatian, These facts undermine the Croatian language proponents' argument that modern-day Croatian is based on a language called Old Croatian.
South Slavic languages
This dialect is spoken primarily in the federal state of Burgenland in Austria and nearby areas in Vienna, Slovakia, and Hungary by descendants of Croats who migrated there during the 16th century. This dialect (or family of dialects) differs from standard Croatian, since it has been heavily influenced by German and Hungarian. It has properties of all three major dialectal groups in Croatia, since the migrants did not all come from the same area. The linguistic standard is based on a Chakavian dialect, and (like all Chakavian dialects) is characterized by very conservative grammatical structures: for example, it preserves case endings lost in the Shtokavian base of standard Croatian. At most 100,000 people speak Burgenland Croatian and almost all are bilingual in German. Its future is uncertain, but there is movement to preserve it. It has official status in six districts of Burgenland, and is used in some schools in Burgenland and neighboring western parts of Hungary.
Marin Temperica
The Catholic Reformists believed that it was necessary to determine what would be the most understandable language version on the territory populated by South Slavs. Temperica emphasized the importance of the Slavic literary language understandable all over the Balkans. In the report, he uses the Latin term "lingua sclavona" (lit. "Slavonian language") or "scalavona" (lit. Slavic language) for the vernacular of Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina, while naming Church Slavonic as the literary language. Temperica insisted on Shtokavian as most widespread on the Balkans. He reported that the same language was spoken on the territory between Dubrovnik and Bulgaria, in Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina, being most appropriate basis for common South Slavic literary language.
Origin hypotheses of the Croats
The origin of the Croats before the great migration of the Slavs is uncertain. The modern Croats are considered a Slavic people, but the archaeological and other historic evidence on the migration of the Slavic settlers, the character of native population on present-day territory of Croatia, and their mutual relationship show diverse historical influences.
Srb
Srb () is a village located in the southeastern part of Lika, in Croatia, till 2011 administratively divided into Donji Srb (population 255, census 2001) and Gornji Srb (population 79, census 2001). Srb lies in the Una River valley, on the road from Donji Lapac to Knin, and is east of Gračac. It is currently part of the Gračac municipality and the Zadar County.
Serbian culture
Serbs speak the Serbian language, a member of the South Slavic group of languages, specifically in the Southwestern Slavic group with the Southeastern Slavic languages including Macedonian and Bulgarian. It is mutually intelligible with the standard Croatian and Bosnian language (see Differences in standard Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) and some linguists still consider it part of the pre-war Serbo-Croatian language.
Croatia–Serbia relations
Serbian and Croatian, official languages in Serbia and Croatia respectively, are mutually intelligible, being standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian language.
Church Slavonic language
Church Slavonic, also known as Church Slavic, New Church Slavonic, or New Church Slavic, is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Macedonia, Ukraine, Slovenia, and Croatia. The language appears also in the services of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese and occasionally in the services of the Orthodox Church in America. It was also used by the Orthodox Churches in Romanian lands until the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as well as by Roman Catholic Croats in the Early Middle Ages.
It is also co-used by Greek Catholic Churches, which are under Roman communion, in Slavic countries, for example the Croatian, Slovak and Ruthenian Greek Catholics, as well as by the Roman Catholic Church (Croatian and Czech recensions, see below).
South Slavic languages
The South Slavic dialects form a dialectal continuum stretching from today's southern Austria to southeast Bulgaria. On the level of dialectology, they are divided into Western South Slavic (Slovene and Serbo-Croatian dialects) and Eastern South Slavic (Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects); these represent separate migrations into the Balkans and were once separated by intervening Hungarian, Romanian, and Albanian populations; as these populations were assimilated, Eastern and Western South Slavic fused with Torlakian as a transitional dialect. On the other hand, the breakup of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, followed by formation of nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries, led to the development and codification of standard languages. Standard Slovene, Bulgarian, and Macedonian are based on distinct dialects. The Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standard variants of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian are based on the same dialect (Shtokavian). Thus, in most cases national and ethnic borders do not coincide with dialectal boundaries.
Senahid Halilović
Halilović is a founding member and current president of the Slavic Committee in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In September 2008, the "Slavic Committee" was officially inducted into the International Slavic Committee (MSK), a worldwide community of Slavic Association.
Demographics of Bosnia and Herzegovina
All standard varieties are based on the Ijekavian varieties of the Shtokavian dialect (non-standard spoken varieties including, beside Ijekavian, also Ikavian Shtokavian). Serbian and Bosnian are written in both Latin and Cyrillic (the latter predominantly using the Latin script), whereas Croatian is written only in Latin alphabet. There are also some speakers of Italian, German, Turkish and Ladino. Yugoslav Sign Language is used with Croatian and Serbian variants.
Slavs
Proto-Slavic, the supposed ancestor language of all Slavic languages, is a descendant of common Proto-Indo-European, via a Balto-Slavic stage in which it developed numerous lexical and morphophonological isoglosses with the Baltic languages. In the framework of the Kurgan hypothesis, "the Indo-Europeans who remained after the migrations [from the steppe] became speakers of Balto-Slavic". Proto-Slavic is defined as the last stage of the language preceding the geographical split of the historical Slavic languages. That language was uniform, and on the basis of borrowings from foreign languages and Slavic borrowings into other languages, cannot be said to have any recognizable dialects – this suggests that there was, at one time, a relatively small Proto-Slavic homeland.
Origin hypotheses of the Croats
Anthropologically, the craniometrical measurements made on the contemporary Croatian population of the city of Zagreb showed it is predominantly dolichocephalic, more specifically mesocephalia and leptoprosopia prevail in South Dalmatia, and brachycephaly and euryprosopy in Central Croatia. According to the 1998-2004 craniometric study of medieval Central European archaeological sites, four Dalmatian and two Bosnian sites clustered with Polish sites, two Continental Croatia (Avaro-Slav) sites were classified into the cluster of Hungarian sites west of the Danube, while the two sites from the Bijelo Brdo culture were into the cluster of Slav sites from Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. Comparison to the Scythian-Sarmatian sites did not reveal significant similarity in cranial morphology, nor was supported the idea of the Avar frontiersmen. The results indicate that the nucleus of the early Croat state in Dalmatia was of Slavic ancestry, which arrived from the area somewhere in Poland probably along the direct route Nitra-Zalaszabar-Nin, and gradually expanded into the continental hinterland of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the 10th century, however, by the end of the 11th century did not in Eastern Slavonia. The 2015 study of medieval skeletal remains in Šopot (14th-15th century) and Ostrovica (9th century) found out they cluster with other Dalmatian sites as well Polish sites, concluding that "PCA showed that all Eastern Adriatic coast sites were closely related in cranial morphology, and thus, most likely had similar biological makeup".
Slovaks of Croatia
Most Croatian Slovaks live in the region of Slavonia, with the majority residing in the Osijek-Baranja county and the Vukovar-Syrmia county.
Dialects of Serbo-Croatian
Molise Slavic or "Slavomolisano" is a variety of the Shtokavian dialect with some Chakavian influences spoken in the province of Campobasso, in the Molise Region of southern Italy, in the villages of Montemitro ("Mundimitar"), Acquaviva Collecroce ("Živavoda Kruč") and San Felice del Molise ("Štifilić"). There are fewer than 1,000 active speakers, and fewer than 2,000 passive speakers. The language has been preserved since a group of Croats emigrated from Dalmatia abreast of advancing Ottoman Turks. The residents of these villages speak a Chakavian dialect with Ikavian accent. The Molise Croats, however, consider themselves to be Italians who speak a Slavic language, rather than ethnic Slavs. Some speakers call themselves "Zlavi" or "Harvati" and call their language simply "na našo" ("our language").
Croats
In Croatia (the nation state), 3.9 million people identify themselves as Croats, and constitute about 90.4% of the population. Another 553,000 live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they are one of the three constituent ethnic groups, predominantly living in Western Herzegovina, central Bosnia and Posavina. The minority in Serbia number about 70,000, mostly in Vojvodina, where also vast majority of the Šokci consider themselves Croats, as well as many Bunjevci (the latter, as well as other nationalities, settled the vast, abandoned area after the Ottoman retreat; this Croat subgroup originates from the south, mostly from the region of Bačka). Smaller Croat autochthonous minorities exist in Slovenia (mainly in Primorska, Prekmurje and in the Metlika area in Dolenjska regions – 35,000 Croats), Montenegro (mostly in the Bay of Kotor – 6,800 Croats), and a regional community in Kosovo called Janjevci who nationally identify as Croats. In the 1991 census Croats consisted 19.8% of the overall population of former Yugoslavia; there were around 4.6 million Croats in the entire country.