Italian language in Croatia
As of 2009, the Italian language is officially used in twenty cities and municipalities and ten other settlements in Croatia, according to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. It is an officially recognized minority language in Istria County, where it is spoken by 6.83% of the population on the aggregate and closer to 50% of the population in certain subdivisions.
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The population of Yugoslavia spoke mainly three languages: Serbo-Croatian, Slovene and Macedonian. The Serbo-Croatian language was spoken by the populations in the federal republics of SR Serbia, SR Croatia, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, and SR Montenegro – a total of 12,390,000 people by the late 1980s. Slovene was spoken by approximately 2,000,000 inhabitants of SR Slovenia, while Macedonian was spoken by 1,210,000 inhabitants of SR Macedonia. National minorities used their own languages as well, with 506,000 speaking Hungarian (primarily in SAP Vojvodina), and 2,000,000 persons speaking Albanian in SR Serbia (primarily in SAP Kosovo), SR Macedonia and SR Montenegro. Turkish, Romanian (primarily in SAP Vojvodina), and Italian (primarily in Istria and parts of Dalmatia) were also spoken to a lesser extent. The Yugoslav Albanians, almost exclusively Ghegs, chose to use the unified literary language of Albania predominantly based on Tosk Albanian (a different dialect), for political reasons.