Croatian language

From Slavic.info

Known as Serbo-Croatian (Srpskohrvatski jezik), this South Slavic language is the native language of inhabitants of Croatia. The same language used in Serbia differs in modern alphabet, and few details historically, for Croats are mostly Roman Catholic in confession, and then there was the influence of Austro-Hungarian empire, so they did not incline so much to Cyrillic, and then in 1830 Ljudevit Gaj (1809-1872) addapted Latin alphabet specially for needs of Croatian language. With few slight changes is Gaj's alphabet used for Slovene language, there known as Gajica.

Now there is Serbian, Bosnian, and recently Montenegrin version and alphabet of this Slavic language. Croats and Bosniaks use latin script. There are very few slight differences between those three, and there is no problem with communication.

The earliest know manuscripts in Serbo-Croatian are dated from 12th century, but the language was just dialect of Old Church Slavonic till the end of 17th century, when a literary, written form of the language called Slavono-Serbian was developed.

Croatian language belongs among Shtokavian dialects of Slavic languages. Shtokavian is a term that classifies the dialects by the word for „what“, which is in this case „shto“ (što). For comparation, Russian language is Chtokavian, the word for „what“ is „chto“ (čto). There are two other rare dialect of Slavic language in Croatia - Chakavian, in which "what" is "cha" (ča), and that can be found in Istria and on Dalmatian islands, and Kajkavian dialect, in which most interestingly the word for "what" is "kay" (kaj). This dialect can be heard around Zagreb.

Croatian Alphabet

A, a	G, g	O, o
B, b	H, h	P, p
C, c	I, i	R, r
Č, č	J, j	S, s
Ć, ć	K, k	Š, š
D, d	L, l	T, t
Dž, dž	Lj, lj	U, u
Đ, đ	M, m	V, v
E, e	N, n	Z, z
F, f	Nj, nj	Ž, ž