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.
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.