Croatian is a South Slavic language spoken in many countries around the world. It not only functions as a literary language but also as the official language in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. Croatian has a rich and fascinating history.
Croatian has a dual grammatical aspect, meaning it has a distinction between perfective and imperfective aspects in its verbs. As a result, Croatian can express the concept of completing an action within one verb.
The Croatian alphabet consists of 35 letters, written using Latin rather than Cyrillic script. It differs from the Bosnian and Serbian languages, all written using Cyrillic and Latin alphabets.
Croatian has gained a lot of influence from the Venetian language over the years, leading to many Croatian words originating from the Venetian language, such as bicikla (bicycle).
The Croatian language was written primarily in the Glagolitic alphabet before the 18th century and established in the 9th century. This alphabet is still present in some Croatian dialects to this day.
The Croatian language is known for its abundance of synonyms and sounding words, with an average of 50 words for every word in English.
Croatian has phonemes unique to the language not found in any other language. It includes an affricate “Č” and an indistinctive “Ł.”
Due to centuries of separation and development, there are distinct differences between the Croatian spoken in Croatia and the Bosnian and Serbian languages in neighboring countries.
Croatian has seven cases in its grammar, which is also in line with a few other South Slavic languages, such as Serbian and Bosnian.
Similar to many other languages, the Croatian language has recently developed a slang term for the internet called ‘webić.’
While it is not an official language of the European Union, Croatian is recognized as one of its working languages due to the influx of immigrants from former Yugoslav countries into the EU.
