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Croatian belongs to the South Slavic group of
the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. After the breakup of
Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian, defined as the common language of Serbs, Croats,
Bosniaks and Montenegrins, officially split into three mutually intelligible
languages -- Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. Though the term "Serbo-Croatian"
went out of use, it continues to be a focus of controversy due to its
historical, cultural, and political connotations and to the lack of precision in
the definition of the term "language." Suffice it to say that these languages
are artifacts of political, rather than linguistic decisions.
The eastern part of Yugoslavia (i.e., Serbia, Montenegro, portions of Bosnia and
Herzegovina) were religiously and culturally distinct from the western part of
of the country (i.e., Croatia, and portions of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Serbia
was under Ottoman rule, while Croatia was under Austro-Hungarian rule As a
result, Serbian and Croatian are based on different dialects and are written
with different alphabets. Serbian and Croatian became one language in the 19th
century as part of an effort to create an independent South Slavic state (yug
means "south").
Although Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian differ in a number of ways, these
differences do not preclude mutual intelligibility and, in fact, are not as
great as the differences within the languages themselves. This is not surprising
since the continuous migrations of Slavic populations during the five hundred
years of Turkish rule produced a crazy quilt of local dialects that cross more
recently established national boundaries.
Dictionary of Croatian words and related Croatian
Language resources
Related Popular Terms for searching to get more
resources
Vocabulary
The differences between Croatian on the one hand and Serbian and Bosnian on
the other occur mostly in the lexicon. Croatian has preserved more native
Slavic words, while Serbian, and to some extent Bosnian, have borrowed more
from Russian and western European languages.
Some loanwords may differ slightly across the three languages because,
historically, in Croatian, they came mostly from German and Italian, while
Serbian borrowed words mostly from French and Russian.
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Serbian |
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organizirati
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organizovati
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organizirati
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"to organize"
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realizirati
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realizovati
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realizirati
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"to realize"
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minuta
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minut
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minut
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"minute"
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An interesting difference in basic vocabulary between
Croatian, on the one hand, and Serbian and Bosnian, on the other hand,
involves the names of the months. While Serbian and Bosnian borrowed the
names from western languages, Croatian uses inherently Slavic words, e.g.,
Croatian travanj and Serbian /Bosnian
april, Croatian listopad (literally
"leaf fall") and Bosnian/Bosnian oktobar.
Below are some common phrases in Croatian.
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zdravo
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molim
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hvala
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izvinite
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da
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ne
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Below are the numbers 1-10 in Croatian.
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1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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7
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8
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9
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10
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jedan
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dva
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tri
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cetiri
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pet
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sest
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sedam
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osam
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devet
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deset
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Writing
The original alphabet used by both the Serbs and Croats was Glagolitic. It
was created by the monks Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century for Old
Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the time. In the Orthodox areas
of Serbia and Bosnia, Glagolitic was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in
the 12th century. The Cyrillic alphabet (along with the Latin alphabet,
which was adopted in Catholic areas) was reformed by linguists in the 19th
century to create a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters as
well as a one-to-one correspondence between the symbols in the Cyrillic and
Latin alphabets. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was revised by Vuk Stefanović
Karadžić in the 19th century. The Croatian Latin alphabet was revised
shortly afterwards by Ljudevit Gaj who added five extra symbols to the
standard Latin alphabet by borrowing letters from Czech and Polish, and
inventing the digraphs "lj", "nj" and "dž" for phonemes represented by
single letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. The two alphabets map well onto
each other. Croats in Croatia, and Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia and
Hercegovina mostly use the Latin alphabet.
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Croatian Dictionaries
