Croatian language

The Croatian language is a language of the western group of South Slavic languages which is used primarily by the Croats. It is one of the standard versions of the Central-South Slavic diasystem.

Illyrian period

But, due to the unique Croat linguistic situation, formal shaping of Croatian standard language was a process that took almost four centuries to complete: Croatian is a three dialects tongue (a somewhat simplistic way to distinguish between dialects is to refer to the pronoun what, which is ?a, kaj, ?to in, respectively, ?akavian, kajkavian and ?tokavian dialects) and three scripts language (Glagolitic, Croatian/Western/Bosnian Cyrillic and Latin script, with Latin script as the ultimate winner). The final obstacle to the unified Croatian literary language (based on celebrated vernacular Croatian Troubadour, Renaissance and Baroque -- acronym TRB) literature (ca. 1490 to ca. 1670) from Dalmatia, Dubrovnik and Boka Kotorska was surmounted by Croatian national awakener Ljudevit Gaj's standardization of Latin scriptory norm in 1830–1850s.

Related Topics:
?akavian - Kajkavian - ?tokavian - Glagolitic - Cyrillic - Latin - Literary language - Dalmatia - Boka Kotorska - Ljudevit Gaj

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Gaj and his Illyrian movement (centred in kajkavian-speaking Croatia's capital Zagreb) were, however, important more politically than linguistically. They "chose" ?tokavian dialect because they didn't have any other realistic option—?tokavian, or, more precisely, neo?tokavian (a version of ?tokavian which emerged in the 15th/16th century) was the major Croatian literary tongue from 1700s on. The 19th century linguists and lexicographers' main concern was to achieve a more consistent and unified scriptory norm and orthography; an effort followed by peculiar Croatian linguistic characteristics which may be humorously described as "passion for neologisms" or vigorous word coinage, originating from the purist nature of Croatian literary language. One of the peculiarities of the "developmental trajectory" of the Croatian language is that there is no single towering figure among the Croatian linguists/philologists, because the vernacular osmotically percolated into the "high culture" via literary works so there was no need for revolutionary linguistic upheavals—only reforms sufficed.

Related Topics:
Zagreb - 15th - 16th century - 19th century - Neologism - Word coinage - Purist

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:See also: Croatian linguistic purism

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