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.
Dalibor Brozović
Instead of "Serbo-Croatian", Brozović preferred the term "Central South Slavic diasystem", asserting separate language status for Croatian and Serbian. However, Brozović advocated the term "Croato-Serbian" even in 1988. As far as language status is concerned, Brozović has asserted for nearly three decades that "the Serbian and Croatian variants are (...) phenomenons, which are analogous to the English and American variants"; "As in other cases where several nations use one standard language (German, Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese standard language), the standard Croato-Serbian language is not unified. In linguistics (especially in sociolinguistics), the realizations of such standard languages are called "variants of a standard language"". Brozović maintained that it is "a fact that Serbs and Croats have a common language", and he described it as pluricentric even in 1992. In the 1990s, Brozović became one of the leading proponents of linguistic purism in Croatia.