Croatia
Croatian is the official language of Croatia, and became the 24th official language of the European Union upon its accession in 2013. Minority languages are in official use in local government units where more than a third of population consists of national minorities or where local legislation defines so. Those languages are Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Ruthenian, Serbian, and Slovak.
According to the 2011 Census, 95.6% of citizens of Croatia declared Croatian as their native language, 1.2% declared Serbian as their native language, while no other language is represented in Croatia by more than 0.5% of native speakers among population of Croatia. Croatian is a member of the South Slavic languages of Slavic languages group, and is written using the Latin alphabet. There are three major dialects spoken on the territory of Croatia, with standard Croatian based on the Shtokavian dialect. The Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects are distinguished by their lexicon, phonology, and syntax.
Croatian replaced Latin as the official language of the Croatian government in the 19th century. In Yugoslavia, from 1972 to 1989, the language was constitutionally designated as "Croatian literary language". It was the result of the resistance to "Serbo-Croatian" in the form of a Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language and Croatian Spring. Croatians are protective of their Croatian language from foreign influences and are known for Croatian linguistic purism, 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 or sounding ones).
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.