Native Name: Hrvatski

Official Language: Croatia

Background
It belongs to the Indo-European family, Slavonic group, South Slavonic subgroup, and is spoken by nearly 5 million people. Croatian language (hrvatski jezik) is a South Slavic language which is used primarily in Croatia, by Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in neighboring countries where Croats are autochthonous communities, and parts of the Croatian diaspora. It is one of the languages belonging to the Central-South Slavic disesteem.

Croatian is based on the Ijekavian pronunciation of Stokavian dialect (with some influence from Cakavian and Kajkavian) and written with the Croatian alphabet.

The modern Croatian standard language is a continuous outgrowth of more than nine hundred years of literature written in a mixture of Croatian Church Slavonic and the vernacular language. Croatian Church Slavonic was abandoned by the mid-15th century, and Croatian as embodied in a purely vernacular literature (Croatian literature) has existed for more than five centuries.Latin script is used.

Reprinted from www.unhchr.ch/udhr