Croatian is the official language of Croatia. It is also one of the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Burgenland state of Austria.
Croatian is a descendent of Old Church Slavonic, which makes it a member of the South Slavic branch of the Indo-European family. Before the break-up of Yugoslavia, the language was known as Serbocroatian or less commonly as Croatoserbian. Political considerations and nationalist aspirations have done much to emphasize the differences between Serbian and Croatian, and there are very few scholars left who treat these languages as if they were merely dialects of the same native tongue. The Croatian language is also closely related to Bosnian.
One of the most obvious differences between Croatian and Serbian is the different alphabets they use. Unlike Serbian, which uses a Cyrillic alphabet, Croatian uses a version of the Latin alphabet (the same alphabet used by English). There are 30 letters in the Croatian alphabet, including several letters that appear as consonants with diacritic marks above them.
Not surprisingly, Croatian vocabulary has much in common with Serbian and Bosnian. In many cases, speakers of these languages can even communicate between one another. However, in recent times, it is the differences rather than the similarities that are often emphasized. Croatian has also borrowed words from a number of other languages, such as German and Italian, while Serbian prefers to borrow from Russian or French. English has also contributed words to Croatian.
Like other Slavic languages, Croatian groups its nouns into three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Persons, places, things, and ideas will have their respective gender, case, and number reflected by the word endings. A fairly safe assumption is that masculine nouns will end in consonants, feminine nouns in
a (and occasionally
t), and neuter nouns in
o or
e. Croatian pronouns agree in gender and number with their antecedents. Adjectives modify nouns and pronouns and take on their case, number, and gender. Adverbs, however, do not decline in Croatian.
Most of the time, Croatian verbs function like English verbs. The key difference is
aspect, or information pertaining to the degree of completion of the action the verb describes. As a result, Croatian verbs are usually a part of binary pair:
perfective verbs describe actions already completed in the past or ones that will be completed in the future while
imperfective verbs describe ongoing actions. Fine shades of difference in meaning may be generated through the prefixes taken by the perfective form.
Regular practice is important to learn to speak Croatian well. That's why good
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