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).
Croatian literature
A special place in the literature of the 18th century is held by the poet and writer Filip Grabovac and the Franciscan writer Andrija Kačić Miošić. Grabovac's ""Cvit razgovora naroda i jezika iliričkoga aliti rvackoga"" (Conversation of peasants and the Illyrian language), from 1747 unites Croatian medieval literature with that of the Bosnian Franciscans, while Kačić's ""Razgovor ugodni naroda slovinskoga"" (Peasant conversation of Slavic people) from 1756 in verse and prose, was once one of the most widely read books in the Croatian language (translated into a dozen languages and has been reprinted almost 70 times by the end of the 20th century). It was this work, together with that of Matija Antun Relković, that definitively set the idioms for the Croatian language in the Croatian National Revival movement. Relković, as a prisoner in Dresden, compared Slavonia with Germany in his 1762 poem ""Satir iliti divji čovik"" (Satyr or Wild man). Relković's influence is generally contained in his linguistic idioms and other grammatical and philological works. Having spread the štokavian idiom in the second half of the 18th century, he is, along with Andrija Kačić Miošić, considered to be one of the most decisive influences that helped shape the Croatian standard language.