Chakavian
Chakavian or Čakavian , , ( , proper name: "čakavica" or "čakavština" , own name: "čokovski, čakavski, čekavski") is a dialect of the Serbo-Croatian language spoken by a minority of Croats. It has a low mutual intelligibility with Shtokavian. There is much internal diversity, to the point where intelligibility between the northern and southern varieties of Chakavian is low. All three main Serbo-Croatian dialects are named after their most common word for "what?", which in Čakavian is "ča" or "ca". Chakavian is spoken mainly in the northeastern Adriatic: in Istria, Kvarner Gulf, in most Adriatic islands, and in the interior valley of Gacka, more sporadically in the Dalmatian littoral and central Croatia.
Comparison of standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian
In socialist Yugoslavia, the official policy insisted on one unitary language with two regional normative varieties—Eastern (used in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina by all ethnicities, either with the Ekavian or the Ijekavian accent) and Western (used in Croatia by all ethnicities, the Ijekavian accent only). However, due to discontent in Croatian intellectual circles, beginning in the late 1960s Croatian cultural workers started to refer to the language exclusively as 'the Croatian literary language', or sometimes 'the Croatian or Serbian language' (these two names were also prescribed in the Croatian constitution of 1974), as was common before Yugoslavia. The language was regarded as one common language with different variants and dialects. The unity of the language was emphasized, making the differences not an indicator of linguistic divisions, but rather factors enriching the 'common language' diversity. In addition, Yugoslavia had two other official languages on the federal level, Slovenian and Macedonian, reflecting Yugoslavia's acceptance of diversity with regards to language use. No attempts were made to assimilate those languages into the Serbo-Croatian language.