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.
Minority languages of Croatia
The Constitution of Croatia in its preamble defines Croatia as a nation state of ethnic Croats, a country of traditionally present communities that the constitution recognizes as national minorities and a country of all its citizens. National minorities explicitly enumerated and recognized in the Constitution are Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Austrians, Ukrainians, Rusyns, Bosniaks, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Russians, Bulgarians, Poles, Romani, Romanians, Turks, Vlachs and Albanians. Article 12 of the constitution states that the official language in Croatia is the Croatian language, but also states that in some local governments another language and Cyrillic or some other script can be introduced in official use.