🇭🇷Croatian for English speakers

1. Croatian: a South Slavic language with a complicated passport

The graded readers below are original passages written for LinguaCommons to give each CEFR band sustained text in the target language. They are teaching material, not corpus evidence: they are not attested usage, not quotations, and not drawn from any published source. Vocabulary is drawn from this guide's own SRS deck wherever possible, so every passage is auditable against the flashcards on the same page. Grammar and usage claims elsewhere in the guide remain sourced to the citations at the foot of the page.

Croatian — hrvatski jezik — is a South Slavic language of the Indo-European family, standardised on a Neo-Shtokavian, Ijekavian dialect base.¹² It is the sole official language of the Republic of Croatia, one of the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union since Croatia's accession in 2013.²³

It is also a language whose very identity is a live scholarly and political dispute, and a guide that hides that is not doing its job. Standard Croatian, Standard Serbian, Standard Bosnian and the emerging Standard Montenegrin are all built on the same Neo-Shtokavian dialect base — Eastern Herzegovinian — and differ mainly in the reflex of the Proto-Slavic yat vowel, in some lexical choices, and for Serbian in script preference.⁴ Whether that makes them four languages or four standards of one language is the question, and it does not have a neutral answer. Section 11 treats it properly. For now: this guide teaches Standard Croatian as codified in Croatia, and says so.

Croatian at a glance

2. The alphabet, and why it is the easiest part

Gaj's Latin alphabet has 30 letters and is very close to one letter per phoneme.⁵ Once you know the thirty, you can pronounce any Croatian word you see, including names you have never met. There is no spelling bee culture in Croatia because there is nothing to hold one about.

The letters an English speaker will get wrong first

Two things the alphabet does not tell you

First, vowel length is phonemic but unwritten. Croatian has five vowel qualities — i, e, a, o, u — each occurring distinctively short and long, and standard orthography does not mark the difference except in dictionaries and specialist work.⁷ You will learn length by ear or not at all.

Second, r can be a syllable nucleus all by itself. In vrt 'garden' there is no vowel; the r is the syllable, realised long or short — Landau et al. describe long syllabic r as four to five contacts of the trill against one to two for the short — sometimes with a slight [ə]-like glide.⁷ This is why Croatian tolerates words like krv 'blood', prst 'finger' and the much-quoted tourist trap Krk. They are not unpronounceable; they are just not vowelless in the way they look.

Reader A1 — Dobro jutro (Good morning)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not Croatian literature; section 12 lists real Croatian writing to move on to.

Dobro jutro. Ja sam Ana. Ja sam iz Hrvatske. Živim u malenoj kući blizu mora. Kuća je stara, ali lijepa. Imam jednu sobu, kuhinju i vrata koja gledaju na vrt. U vrtu imam drvo i cvijet. Volim svoju kuću. Volim more. Svaki dan gledam more i nebo. Ljeti je more toplo, a zimi je hladno i sivo, ali je uvijek lijepo.

— Good morning. I am Ana. I am from Croatia. I live in a small house near the sea. The house is old, but beautiful. I have one room, a kitchen and a door that looks onto the garden. In the garden I have a tree and a flower. I love my house. I love the sea. Every day I look at the sea and the sky. In summer the sea is warm, and in winter it is cold and grey, but it is always beautiful.

Ujutro pijem kavu i jedem kruh sa sirom. Kava je vruća i dobra. Poslije doručka idem van. Vani je sunce, ali ponekad pada kiša. Danas je lijep dan: nebo je plavo i vjetar je topao. Imam psa. Moj pas je malen i smeđ. On trči, a ja hodam. Mi idemo na plažu. Plaža je blizu, samo deset minuta.

— In the morning I drink coffee and eat bread with cheese. The coffee is hot and good. After breakfast I go out. Outside there is sun, but sometimes it rains. Today is a beautiful day: the sky is blue and the wind is warm. I have a dog. My dog is small and brown. He runs, and I walk. We go to the beach. The beach is near, only ten minutes.

Navečer čitam knjigu ili pišem. Imam olovku i papir. Učim engleski, i to je teško, ali važno. Volim učiti. Moja majka kaže da je dobro učiti svaki dan, malo po malo. Ona je stara, ali čita više nego ja. Kasnije jedem večeru: juhu, meso i krumpir. Ponekad jedem ribu, jer more je blizu i riba je dobra i jeftina.

— In the evening I read a book or write. I have a pencil and paper. I am learning English, and it is difficult, but important. I love learning. My mother says it is good to learn every day, little by little. She is old, but she reads more than I do. Later I eat dinner: soup, meat and potato. Sometimes I eat fish, because the sea is near and fish is good and cheap.

Pijem vodu, ne pijem vino. Poslije večere sjedim i gledam kroz prozor. Vidim zvijezde. Nebo je crno i tiho. Onda idem spavati. Laku noć! Sutra je novi dan, i sutra ću opet gledati more. Imam prijatelja koji živi daleko, u velikom gradu, i on kaže da je moj život malen. Možda je istina. Ali ja volim svoj dom i volim svoj život. To je dovoljno.

— I drink water, I don't drink wine. After dinner I sit and look through the window. I see the stars. The sky is black and quiet. Then I go to sleep. Good night! Tomorrow is a new day, and tomorrow I will look at the sea again. I have a friend who lives far away, in a big city, and he says my life is small. Maybe it's true. But I love my home and I love my life. That is enough.

Graded reader — Zovem se Ana

Zovem se Ana i živim u Zagrebu. Imam dvadeset i pet godina i studiram povijest. Stanujem u malom stanu blizu tržnice. Ujutro pijem kavu i jedem kruh sa sirom. Kava je jaka i vruća, a kruh je uvijek svjež. Konobar u kafiću zove se Ivan i svako jutro kaže isto: «Dobro jutro, kao i obično?» Ja kažem da, jer ne volim mijenjati navike.

Moja obitelj nije velika. Imam brata i sestru. Brat se zove Marko i ima dvadeset godina. Sestra se zove Petra i ima sedamnaest godina. Roditelji žive u malom gradu blizu mora. Otac je učitelj, a majka radi u bolnici. Vikendom idem k njima autobusom. Put traje tri sata, ali volim gledati kroz prozor.

Danas je subota i ne radim. Želim kupiti knjigu i onda šetati parkom. Vrijeme je lijepo: nebo je plavo i nije hladno. U parku su djeca, psi i jedna žena koja prodaje cvijeće. Sjedim na klupi i čitam pola sata. Navečer idem na večeru s dvije prijateljice. One govore brzo, ali razumijem gotovo sve. Nije poseban dan, ali sam zadovoljna.

Poslije večere idemo pješice kući jer grad nije velik i nije kasno. Zagreb je noću tih, a prozori su žuti. Sutra počinje novi tjedan: imam predavanje u devet i moram napisati seminar. Ali sada ne mislim na to. Volim ovaj grad i volim subotu.

English

My name is Ana and I live in Zagreb. I am twenty-five and I study history. I live in a small flat near the market. In the morning I drink coffee and eat bread with cheese. The coffee is strong and hot, and the bread is always fresh. The waiter in the café is called Ivan and every morning he says the same thing: “Good morning — the usual?” I say yes, because I don't like changing my habits.

My family isn't big. I have a brother and a sister. My brother is called Marko and he is twenty. My sister is called Petra and she is seventeen. My parents live in a small town near the sea. My father is a teacher and my mother works in a hospital. At weekends I go to them by bus. The journey takes three hours, but I like looking out of the window.

Today is Saturday and I'm not working. I want to buy a book and then walk in the park. The weather is nice: the sky is blue and it isn't cold. In the park there are children, dogs and a woman selling flowers. I sit on a bench and read for half an hour. In the evening I'm going to dinner with two friends. They speak fast, but I understand almost everything. It isn't a special day, but I'm content.

After dinner we walk home because the city isn't big and it isn't late. Zagreb is quiet at night and the windows are yellow. Tomorrow a new week begins: I have a lecture at nine and an essay to write. But right now I'm not thinking about it. I love this city and I love Saturday.

3. Cases: the thing that makes or breaks Croatian

Croatian nouns, pronouns and adjectives decline for seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental.² There are three genders and no articles at all.² This is the central fact of the language, and there is no way around it — Croatian will not let you postpone the cases the way Spanish lets you postpone the subjunctive.

How hard is that in practice? One useful data point comes from teaching practice rather than from theory. A 2006 review of Alexander and Elias-Bursać's Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Textbook records that the morphology and function of all seven cases are presented across the first eight lessons — roughly a first semester — with the future tense arriving in lesson 9, the past tense in lesson 10, and the aorist and imperfect only in lesson 12, described as "otherwise rare forms" included mainly to support reading poetry.⁸ That sequencing tells you what working teachers consider core and what they consider peripheral.

The seven cases in one noun. Functional glosses are orientation-level: each case does considerably more than one job.

A warning about that table. The functional labels above are the standard learner-facing summary, and they are useful, but they are not exhaustive descriptions — the genitive alone covers possession, partitives, dates, negated objects and the objects of a long list of prepositions. The authoritative short description of the grammar is Wayles Browne's "Serbo-Croat" chapter in The Slavonic Languages; this guide cites it as the right place to go and does not reproduce paradigms from it, because its full text was not consulted for this build.⁹

4. Aspect: every verb comes in a pair

Croatian verbs are organised around a binary aspect: perfective (svršeni) and imperfective (nesvršeni).² This is not tense. Both aspects exist across the tenses; the choice encodes whether the action is viewed as a bounded whole or as an ongoing process. English speakers consistently underestimate this because English marks something adjacent with the progressive and then behaves inconsistently.

The textbook example quoted in the review above is worth having: Pišeš li pismo? 'Are you writing a letter?' — imperfective present for an action in progress, what the textbook calls the "actual present".⁸

Reader A2 — U gradu (In the city)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not Croatian literature; section 12 lists real Croatian writing to move on to.

Jučer sam išla u grad s prijateljem. Prijatelj se zove Marko. Marko je moj brat, ali kažem prijatelj jer je i to istina. Išli smo vlakom. Vlak je bio brz, ali ne prebrz. Gledali smo kroz prozor: šumu, rijeku, planinu, jedno jezero. Vidjeli smo ptice i jednog jelena. Marko je rekao da je vidio i lisicu, ali ja mislim da nije istina.

— Yesterday I went to the city with a friend. The friend is called Marko. Marko is my brother, but I say friend because that is also true. We went by train. The train was fast, but not too fast. We looked through the window: forest, river, mountain, a lake. We saw birds and one deer. Marko said he also saw a fox, but I think it isn't true.

U gradu smo kupili kruh, mlijeko, jaja i voće. Kupili smo jabuke i jednu naranču. Sve je bilo skupo. Pitala sam koliko košta kava, a žena je rekla: dvadeset kuna. Ne, sada ne kažemo kune, sada kažemo euro. Teško je zapamtiti. Marko je platio, i ja sam rekla hvala lijepa. On je rekao nema problema.

— In the city we bought bread, milk, eggs and fruit. We bought apples and one orange. Everything was expensive. I asked how much the coffee costs, and the woman said: twenty kuna. No, now we don't say kuna, now we say euro. It's hard to remember. Marko paid, and I said thank you very much. He said no problem.

Poslije smo sjedili i pili kavu. Marko je govorio o poslu, a ja sam slušala. On radi u velikoj tvrtki i često nema vremena. Onda sam ja govorila o knjizi koju čitam. Knjiga je duga i teška, ali dobra. Marko je rekao da on ne čita knjige, samo novine. Rekla sam mu da to nije dobro, a on se smijao.

— Afterwards we sat and drank coffee. Marko talked about work, and I listened. He works at a big company and often has no time. Then I talked about the book I am reading. The book is long and difficult, but good. Marko said that he doesn't read books, only newspapers. I told him that isn't good, and he laughed.

Kasnije smo hodali blizu mora. Vjetar je bio hladan i more je bilo sivo. Mislila sam da će padati kiša, ali nije padala. Vidjeli smo jednu mačku koja je sjedila na zidu i gledala nas. Marko je htio dati joj hranu, ali nismo imali ništa. Navečer smo se vratili kući vlakom. Bio je dobar dan, i nije bio skup.

— Later we walked near the sea. The wind was cold and the sea was grey. I thought it would rain, but it didn't. We saw a cat sitting on a wall and watching us. Marko wanted to give it food, but we had nothing. In the evening we returned home by train. It was a good day, and it wasn't expensive.

Graded reader — Sedam padeža na tržnici

U subotu sam išla na tržnicu s bakom. Izašle smo rano jer ona kaže da dobro voće nestane prije deset sati. Išle smo tramvajem i stigle oko pola devet. Tržnica je bila puna ljudi i buke. Mirisalo je na peršin, na ribu i na svjež kruh.

Prvo smo kupile povrće, pa voće, pa sir. Baka je pitala za cijenu rajčica, a prodavač je rekao tri eura po kilogramu. Rekla mu je da je skupo i on joj je dao popust. Tako to ide: to nije svađa, nego razgovor, i tako je ovdje oduvijek bilo. Zatim smo uzele tikvice, dvije lubenice i kilogram naranči. Ja sam nosila torbe, a ona je nastavila kupovati.

Tek poslije, dok sam raspremala torbe u kuhinji, shvatila sam koliko sam padeža čula u pola sata. Cijena rajčica — genitiv. Razgovaramo s prodavačem — instrumental. Idemo na tržnicu, a onda smo na tržnici — akuzativ pa lokativ, isti nastavci, druga priča. Nitko mi to nije objašnjavao; baka je samo govorila, a ja sam slušala i polako počela čuti razliku.

Poslijepodne je baka sve pospremila i skuhala čaj. Naučila me kako se biraju lubenice: treba ih lupnuti prstom i slušati zvuk. Ja o tome nisam znala ništa. Ona je to naučila od svoje majke prije šezdeset godina, a rekla mi je da ću jednoga dana i ja nekoga naučiti. Nadam se da hoću.

English

On Saturday I went to the market with my grandmother. We left early because she says the good fruit disappears before ten. We went by tram and arrived at about half past eight. The market was full of people and noise. It smelled of parsley, fish and fresh bread.

First we bought vegetables, then fruit, then cheese. My grandmother asked the price of the tomatoes and the seller said three euros a kilo. She told him it was expensive and he gave her a discount. That's how it goes: it isn't an argument, it's a conversation, and it has always been so here. Then we took courgettes, two watermelons and a kilo of oranges. I carried the bags and she carried on shopping.

Only afterwards, unpacking the bags in the kitchen, did I realise how many cases I had heard in half an hour. The price of the tomatoes — genitive. We talk with the seller — instrumental. We go to the market, and then we are at the market — accusative then locative, the same endings, a different story. Nobody explained it to me; my grandmother simply talked, and I listened and slowly began to hear the difference.

In the afternoon my grandmother put everything away and made tea. She taught me how to choose watermelons: you have to tap them with a finger and listen to the sound. I knew nothing about it. She learned it from her mother sixty years ago, and she told me that one day I would teach someone too. I hope I will.

5. What happens at the joins: assimilation without final devoicing

Croatian obstruents neutralise for voicing inside clusters, and the neutralisation is generally regressive — the last consonant in the cluster decides for the whole cluster.⁷ So /f, ts, x/ surface as [v, dz, ɣ] before a voiced obstruent.

What Croatian does not do is devoice obstruents word-finally — unlike most other Slavic languages, and unlike German.¹⁰ If you have learned Russian or Polish, unlearn the reflex: Croatian grad 'city' ends in a real voiced d, not a t.

Two smaller processes worth knowing because they make you sound less foreign: /m/ is realised labiodental [ɱ] before /f, v/ — tramvaj — and /n/ is realised velar [ŋ] before /k, ɡ/ — stanka.⁷¹⁰ An epenthetic glottal stop may separate a vowel sequence across a word boundary: i onda comes out [iː ʔônda].⁷¹⁰

The č / ć and dž / đ question

Croatian is unusual in having both postalveolar affricates /tʃ, dʒ/ — written č and dž — and palatal ones /tɕ, dʑ/ — written ć and đ. That is a four-way affricate contrast where English has two, and there is no corresponding palatal fricative pair.¹⁰

Here is the part most textbooks omit. In much spoken Croatian these pairs are reported to be merging for many speakers into single postalveolar realisations [tʃ] and [dʒ].¹⁰ Learners agonise over a distinction that a large share of native speakers do not consistently make in speech — while still writing it, because the orthography demands it. Learn to write the difference; do not lose sleep over producing it.

6. Pitch accent: the standard description, and the argument about it

Standard Croatian is described as having a four-way pitch accent: long rising, short rising, long falling and short falling, notated in specialist work as é / è / ȇ / ȅ and never in ordinary orthography.⁷¹⁰ The distribution rules are real and learnable: falling accents occur only on monosyllables or on the first syllable of a longer word — mȃc, mȃma, fȏrma — with a handful of exceptions among exclamations and loanwords, while rising accents can fall on any syllable except the last — zíma, terȁsa.⁷

And here is the honest complication. A peer-reviewed 2019 paper at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences is titled, flatly, "Standard Croatian Pitch Accent: Fact and Fiction"; it argues that genuine minimal pairs distinguished by pitch alone form a small well-attested set, and that the prescriptive four-way system is not consistently realised in the actual speech of many speakers of the standard.¹¹ Alongside it sits the frequently repeated observation that even highly educated speakers in Zagreb will have no tones at all and may place stress on any syllable.¹⁰

The research also undercuts the labels themselves: Lehiste and Ivić found that all stressed syllables are phonetically produced with a high tone, and that listeners judge "rising" versus "falling" by whether that high tone carries over into the first post-tonic syllable.¹⁰ The names describe a perceptual cue, not a pitch shape on the stressed vowel.

Practical advice, therefore: learn where the stress falls, because that is real everywhere. Treat the four-way tonal system as a feature of the codified standard and of some regional speech, learn to recognise it, and do not let failure to produce it stop you speaking. You will be understood in Zagreb.

Clitics, and the second-position rule

Croatian has a set of unstressed clitics — auxiliary forms of biti, short pronoun forms, the question particle li — and they cluster in second position in the clause. Enclitics are always unstressed: on ti je to rekao 'he told you that'.⁷¹⁰ Proclitics may be unstressed before a rising-tone word, u vòdi 'in water', but can themselves take a shifted, always short falling accent stolen from a following monosyllable: ù grad 'to town', from grȃd.⁷¹⁰ How often that shift happens differs sharply by variety — reportedly most frequent in spoken Bosnian idioms, more limited in Serbian, and almost absent from Croatian Neo-Shtokavian.¹⁰

Reader B1 — Zašto učim hrvatski (Why I am learning Croatian)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not Croatian literature; section 12 lists real Croatian writing to move on to.

Ljudi me često pitaju zašto učim hrvatski. To je dobro pitanje. Hrvatski nije velik jezik. Ne govori ga mnogo ljudi, i ako želim raditi u velikoj tvrtki, engleski je važniji. Ali jezik nije samo alat. Jezik je i vrata. Kada otvoriš ta vrata, vidiš kuću u kojoj žive ljudi koji te prije nisu mogli čuti.

— People often ask me why I am learning Croatian. That is a good question. Croatian is not a big language. Not many people speak it, and if I want to work in a large company, English is more important. But a language is not only a tool. A language is also a door. When you open that door, you see a house in which people live who could not hear you before.

Prvo sam mislio da će biti lako jer se sve piše kako se govori. To je istina, i to je lijepo. Ali onda sam vidio padeže. Sedam padeža! Prvi mjesec sam samo gledao tablice i mislio da nikad neću razumjeti. Sada razumijem malo bolje, ali još uvijek griješim. Moj prijatelj kaže da griješe i Hrvati, i to me tješi.

— At first I thought it would be easy because everything is written as it is spoken. That is true, and it is beautiful. But then I saw the cases. Seven cases! For the first month I just looked at tables and thought I would never understand. Now I understand a little better, but I still make mistakes. My friend says that Croats make mistakes too, and that comforts me.

Ono što je najteže nije gramatika. Najteže je slušati. Kada ljudi govore brzo, riječi se spoje i ja čujem samo zvuk. Prvo sam mislio da je problem u meni, ali onda mi je jedna žena rekla da i ona ponekad ne razumije ljude iz drugoga grada. To me je jako utješilo.

— What is hardest is not the grammar. The hardest thing is listening. When people speak fast, the words join together and I hear only sound. At first I thought the problem was in me, but then a woman told me that she too sometimes doesn't understand people from another city. That comforted me a great deal.

Ali svaki tjedan je malo bolje. Gledam vijesti, slušam radio, čitam novine. Ne razumijem sve, ali razumijem više nego prije. Mislim da je to dovoljno. Jezik se ne uči za mjesec dana. Jezik se uči cijeli život, i to nije loše. To je zapravo lijepo. Ako jednoga dana budem govorio dobro, bit će to zato što nisam prestao kada je bilo teško.

— But every week it is a little better. I watch the news, I listen to the radio, I read the newspapers. I don't understand everything, but I understand more than before. I think that is enough. A language is not learned in a month. A language is learned a whole life, and that is not bad. That is actually beautiful. If one day I speak well, it will be because I did not stop when it was hard.

Graded reader — Ono što nitko ne objasni

Kad sam počela raditi u uredu, nitko mi nije objasnio kako da se obraćam ljudima. Prvi dan sam kolegici mojih godina rekla «Vi» i ona se nasmijala. «Slobodno mi možeš govoriti ti», rekla je. Pocrvenjela sam i cijelo jutro nisam ni s kim razgovarala. Poslije je ušao direktor i njemu sam, ne razmišljajući, rekla «ti». Ništa nije rekao, ali sam vidjela da je podigao obrvu.

Druga stvar koju nitko ne objasni jest red enklitika. Znala sam sve oblike — sam, si, je, smo, ste, su, me, te, ga, joj — i svejedno sam ih stavljala na krivo mjesto. Pravilo se uči brzo, a osjećaj sporo. Rečenica «Dala sam mu ju je jučer» ne postoji, ali dugo mi je zvučala moguće, jer sam prevodila iz engleskoga umjesto da slušam kako Hrvati zapravo govore.

Treće je bio aspekt. Nitko mi nije rekao da su čitati i pročitati dva različita glagola, a ne dva vremena. Kad sam to konačno shvatila, pola gramatike se posložilo samo od sebe. Ono što mi je najviše pomoglo nije bila vježbenica nego to što sam svaki dan slušala radio, čak i kad nisam razumjela više od polovice.

Danas i dalje griješim, ali griješim drukčije. Prije sam griješila jer nisam znala pravilo; sada griješim jer govorim brže nego što stignem razmisliti, a to je, kažu mi, dobar znak. Kolegica koja mi se prvi dan nasmijala sada me ispravlja usput, između dvije rečenice, i više me nije neugodno.

English

When I started working in the office, nobody explained how I should address people. On the first day I used Vi with a colleague my own age and she laughed. “You can just use ti with me,” she said. I went red and didn't talk to anyone all morning. Later the director came in and, without thinking, I used ti with him. He said nothing, but I saw one eyebrow go up.

The second thing nobody explains is clitic order. I knew all the forms — sam, si, je, smo, ste, su, me, te, ga, joj — and I still put them in the wrong place. The rule is learned quickly; the feel comes slowly. The sentence “Dala sam mu ju je jučer” does not exist, but for a long time it sounded possible to me, because I was translating from English instead of listening to how Croatians actually speak.

The third was aspect. Nobody told me that čitati and pročitati are two different verbs, not two tenses. When I finally understood that, half the grammar arranged itself. What helped me most wasn't a workbook but listening to the radio every day, even when I didn't understand more than half of it.

I still make mistakes today, but I make different ones. Before, I made mistakes because I didn't know the rule; now I make them because I speak faster than I can think, and that, I'm told, is a good sign. The colleague who laughed at me on the first day now corrects me in passing, between two sentences, and I'm no longer embarrassed.

7. Ijekavian, Ekavian, and the vowel that divides the standards

Proto-Slavic had a vowel conventionally written ě, the yat. Its modern reflex is the single clearest formal difference between the standards built on the same dialect base. Standard Croatian and Standard Bosnian are Ijekavian; Standard Serbian is predominantly Ekavian.⁴¹² So 'milk' is mlijeko in Croatian and mleko in Serbian; 'beautiful' is lijep against lep; 'river' is rijeka against reka.

Notice that this is a systematic correspondence, not a vocabulary difference. Once you have it, a large amount of Serbian becomes transparent to a Croatian learner and vice versa — which is precisely why the question of how many languages are involved is hard.

The phantom phoneme

Here Croatian has an internal argument worth knowing about, because it shows you what a prescriptive standard is. The long Ijekavian reflex of yat — the -ije- in mlijeko — is described by the prescriptive grammar of Barić et al. (1997), published by the Institute for the Croatian Language, as a genuine diphthong /ie/, occurring only in long syllables.⁷ Phoneticians have objected: Kapović (2007) calls it a "phantom phoneme" with no basis in actual spoken realisation, arguing the sequence is better analysed as /jeː/.¹⁰

This is a real, unresolved disagreement between a normative institution and descriptive phonetics, and it is not settled here. What a learner should take from it: when a Croatian grammar tells you something categorical about pronunciation, check whether it is describing speech or prescribing it.

8. Word order and information structure

Ethnologue's brief typological sketch gives Croatian SVO as the basic order, with prepositions and a noun-final head pattern.² That is true as far as it goes and it is also the least useful true thing you can say about Croatian word order.

Because the cases mark who did what to whom, word order is freed up to carry information structure instead. Ana vidi Marka, Marka vidi Ana and Vidi Ana Marka all mean that Ana sees Marko; they differ in what is being presented as known and what as new. English, having lost its cases, uses word order for grammatical relations and has to use stress and clefting for the information-structural work. Learning Croatian word order is therefore not learning a rule — it is learning to hear emphasis.

One hard structure to flag early because it catches everyone: relative clauses require the relative pronoun koji, which itself declines for gender, number and case according to its role in the relative clause while agreeing in gender and number with its antecedent. And conditional sentences involve a distinct conditional mood; the "future exact" occurs almost exclusively inside certain conditionals. The reviewer of the standard BCS textbook singles out conditional sentences as "one of the most difficult areas of grammar for students of BCS to master".⁸

Reader B2 — Jedan jezik ili četiri? (One language or four?)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not Croatian literature; section 12 lists real Croatian writing to move on to.

Ako pitate lingvista koliko jezika ima na prostoru Hrvatske, Bosne, Srbije i Crne Gore, nećete dobiti jedan odgovor. Dobit ćete dva odgovora, i oba su ozbiljna. Prvi kaže: to je jedan jezik s četiri standarda, kao što engleski ima britanski i američki standard. Drugi kaže: to su četiri jezika, jer jezik nije samo gramatika nego i zajednica koja govori.

— If you ask a linguist how many languages there are across the area of Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, you will not get one answer. You will get two answers, and both are serious. The first says: it is one language with four standards, as English has a British and an American standard. The second says: they are four languages, because a language is not only grammar but also a community that speaks.

Činjenice su jasne i nitko ih ne osporava. Sva četiri standarda počivaju na istoj osnovi. Razlike su male: refleks staroga glasa jat, nekoliko riječi, i za srpski pismo. Ljudi se razumiju bez prevoditelja. Ali iz istih činjenica dvije strane izvode različite zaključke, jer se ne slažu oko toga što jezik zapravo jest.

— The facts are clear and nobody disputes them. All four standards rest on the same base. The differences are small: the reflex of the old sound yat, a few words, and for Serbian the script. People understand each other without translators. But from the same facts the two sides draw different conclusions, because they do not agree about what a language actually is.

Što bi trebao raditi čovjek koji uči? Mislim da je najbolje ovo: uči jedan standard, znaj da postoje drugi, i nemoj reći ljudima kako se zove njihov jezik. To je njihovo pravo, ne tvoje. Ako učiš hrvatski, razumjet ćeš i srpski i bosanski, i to je velika prednost.

— What should a learner do? I think the best thing is this: learn one standard, know that others exist, and do not tell people what their language is called. That is their right, not yours. If you learn Croatian, you will understand Serbian and Bosnian too, and that is a great advantage.

Ali kada govoriš s nekim, govori onako kako on govori, i ne pravi od jezika politiku ako te nitko nije pitao. Ljudi su ovdje živjeli rat i za mnoge od njih ime jezika nije mala stvar. Stranac koji dođe i objasni im što je njihov jezik ne izgleda pametno nego neuljudno. Slušaj, uči, i pusti da drugi govore o svome imenu.

— But when you speak with someone, speak the way they speak, and do not make politics out of language if nobody asked you. People here lived through a war and for many of them the name of the language is not a small thing. A foreigner who arrives and explains to them what their language is does not look clever but rude. Listen, learn, and let others speak about their own name.

Graded reader — Jat, i zašto se ljudi oko njega svađaju

Prvi put kad sam vidjela riječi mlijeko i mleko jedna uz drugu, mislila sam da je jedna od njih pogreška. Nije. Obje potječu od istoga staroga glasa, koji jezikoslovci zovu jat, a koji se u različitim krajevima razvio različito: negdje u ije ili je, negdje u e, negdje u i. Hrvatski standard počiva na ijekavskoj varijanti, pa se piše mlijeko, dijete, vrijeme.

Problem je što se to pravilo ne primjenjuje mehanički. Duljina sloga odlučuje hoće li biti ije ili je, pa imamo dijete u jednini i djeca u množini, vrijeme i vremena. Govornici koji su odrasli s tim oblicima ne razmišljaju o njima; onima koji uče jezik ostaje da nauče parove napamet i da prihvate kako će griješiti dulje nego što bi htjeli.

Ono što me najviše iznenadilo nije bila fonologija nego to koliko je pitanje političko. Rasprava o tome koji je oblik pravilan rijetko ostaje na razini glasova; vrlo brzo postane rasprava o tome čiji je jezik i tko ga smije opisivati. Kad to jednom vidiš, drukčije čitaš i gramatike i novinske kolumne o jeziku.

Za učenika je najkorisnije prihvatiti da se ovdje ne uči samo oblik nego i njegova povijest. Kad znaš da iza mlijeka i mleka stoji isti stari glas, prestaješ ih doživljavati kao suparnike i počinješ ih čitati kao dvije grane istoga stabla. To ne rješava ispit, ali rješava nelagodu.

English

The first time I saw the words mlijeko and mleko next to each other, I thought one of them was a mistake. It isn't. Both come from the same old sound, which linguists call yat, and which developed differently in different regions: in some places into ije or je, in some into e, in some into i. The Croatian standard rests on the Ijekavian variant, so one writes mlijeko, dijete, vrijeme.

The problem is that the rule is not applied mechanically. Syllable length decides whether it will be ije or je, so we have dijete in the singular and djeca in the plural, vrijeme and vremena. Speakers who grew up with these forms don't think about them; learners are left to memorise the pairs and to accept that they will get it wrong for longer than they'd like.

What surprised me most wasn't the phonology but how political the question is. A debate about which form is correct rarely stays at the level of sounds; very quickly it becomes a debate about whose language it is and who is allowed to describe it. Once you see that, you read both grammars and newspaper columns about language differently.

For a learner the most useful thing is to accept that what is being learned here is not only a form but its history. Once you know that the same old sound stands behind mlijeko and mleko, you stop experiencing them as rivals and begin reading them as two branches of the same tree. That doesn't solve the exam, but it solves the discomfort.

9. Who decides what Croatian is

Standardisation and normative guidance are the responsibility of the state-run Institut za hrvatski jezik. Its Hrvatski pravopis — the orthography handbook — received sole Ministry of Education approval in 2013.⁶ That is an unusually direct institutional link between a research institute and school practice, and it means that in Croatia "correct" has an address.

An advanced learner should understand what that does and does not settle. The Institute can settle orthography and can issue terminological recommendations. It cannot make speakers stop merging č and ć, and it did not stop phoneticians publishing a paper arguing that the accent system it codifies is partly fiction.¹¹ Prescription and description are separate activities, and Croatian is a good language in which to watch the gap.

Where claims about Croatian come from

A note on the numbers in this guide

Ethnologue records essentially universal literacy among native speakers, a 90% L2 literacy rate, and classifies Croatian as "fully developed", noting a Bible translation history spanning 1831–1999.² Those figures come from a single source and are reported here as such. The claim that Croatian aspect is easier to learn than Russian aspect, which circulates widely, traces to one reviewer's assessment in the SlavFile review of the Alexander and Elias-Bursać textbook and is best treated as an opinion rather than an established typological fact.⁸

Reader C1 — Norma i govor (The norm and speech)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not Croatian literature; section 12 lists real Croatian writing to move on to.

Postoji razlika između onoga što norma kaže i onoga što ljudi rade, i ta razlika nije greška nego normalno stanje svakoga živog jezika. U hrvatskom je ta razlika neobično dobro vidljiva, jer je norma jasno zapisana i jer postoji institucija koja je čuva. Kada nešto piše u pravopisu, znamo točno tko to kaže i od kada.

— There is a difference between what the norm says and what people do, and that difference is not an error but the normal state of every living language. In Croatian that difference is unusually visible, because the norm is clearly written down and because there is an institution that guards it. When something is written in the orthography handbook, we know exactly who says it and since when.

Uzmimo naglasak. Norma opisuje četiri naglaska: dva duga i dva kratka, uzlazna i silazna. To je opis koji stoji u knjigama i koji se uči u školi. Ali istraživanja pokazuju da mnogi govornici standarda ne ostvaruju taj sustav dosljedno, a u Zagrebu ima obrazovanih ljudi koji uopće nemaju tonove. Tko je onda u pravu? Oboje, jer ne govore o istoj stvari: jedni opisuju normu, drugi opisuju govor.

— Take the accent. The norm describes four accents: two long and two short, rising and falling. That is the description that stands in the books and that is taught in school. But research shows that many speakers of the standard do not realise that system consistently, and in Zagreb there are educated people who have no tones at all. Who is right, then? Both, because they are not talking about the same thing: one side describes the norm, the other describes speech.

Za onoga tko uči, zaključak je praktičan. Nauči normu, jer ćeš je trebati kada pišeš i kada čitaš ozbiljne tekstove. Ali slušaj govor, jer ćeš s govorom živjeti. Ako nekoga slušaš i on ne govori kako piše u knjizi, to ne znači da griješi.

— For the learner, the conclusion is practical. Learn the norm, because you will need it when you write and when you read serious texts. But listen to speech, because it is with speech that you will live. If you listen to someone and they do not speak the way the book says, it does not mean they are making a mistake.

Možda knjiga opisuje jedan sloj jezika, a on govori drugi. Jezik je veći od svake knjige o njemu, pa i od one najbolje. To vrijedi za svaki jezik, ali u hrvatskom se vidi jasnije nego drugdje, jer je norma mlada i zapisana, a govor star i živ. Tko to razumije, prestaje se bojati grešaka i počinje slušati.

— Perhaps the book describes one layer of the language and they are speaking another. A language is bigger than any book about it, even the best one. That holds for every language, but in Croatian it is seen more clearly than elsewhere, because the norm is young and written down while the speech is old and alive. Whoever understands that stops being afraid of mistakes and starts listening.

Graded reader — Cijena pretjeranih tvrdnji

Valja biti oprezan s opisima koji hrvatski prikazuju kao jedinstvenu cjelinu. Reći «u Hrvatskoj se govori ovako» udobno je, ali sadrži poopćenje koje ne stoji ni unutar jedne županije, a još manje ako se usporedi gradski govor sa seoskim ili govor dviju uzastopnih generacija. Odnos triju narječja — štokavskoga, kajkavskoga i čakavskoga — rijetko stane u sažetak jednoga udžbenika.

Problem nije pojednostavnjivanje samo po sebi, koje je u nastavi neizbježno, nego nestanak traga koji bi omogućio da se ono poništi. Priručnik koji nešto tvrdi bez navođenja odakle podatak dolazi prisiljava čitatelja da ga prihvati ili odbaci u cijelosti, bez sredine. Ograničena tvrdnja — «prema podacima Instituta za hrvatski jezik, u govoru…» — može se poslije ispraviti a da se ostatak ne uruši.

Otuda i inzistiranje na navici da se opseg napiše prije zaključka. Ne radi se o tome da tekst treba zatrpati ogradama dok ne postane nečitljiv, što također nikomu ne pomaže, nego o tome da svaka tvrdnja sa sobom nosi najmanju količinu podataka potrebnu da bi se o njoj moglo raspravljati: tko je opazio, gdje, kada i kojom metodom. Ostalo je stil, a stil se uči mnogo prije opreza.

Vrijedi dodati i da je oprez ovdje praktičan, a ne samo akademski. Tvrdnja bez izvora ne može se popraviti, pa se u sljedećem izdanju obično jednostavno ponovi.

English

One should be careful with descriptions that present Croatian as a single whole. Saying “in Croatia they speak like this” is convenient, but it contains a generalisation that does not hold even within one county, still less if you compare urban with rural speech or two consecutive generations. The relationship between the three dialect groups — Shtokavian, Kajkavian and Chakavian — rarely fits into one textbook's summary.

The problem is not simplification itself, which is unavoidable in teaching, but the disappearance of the trail that would allow it to be undone. A handbook that asserts something without saying where the fact came from forces the reader to accept or reject it whole, with no middle ground. A bounded claim — “according to data from the Institute of Croatian Language, in the speech of…” — can be corrected later without the rest collapsing.

Hence the insistence on the habit of writing the scope before the conclusion. It is not that the text should be buried in qualifications until it becomes unreadable, which helps nobody either, but that each claim should carry the minimum information needed for it to be argued with: who observed, where, when, and by what method. The rest is style, and style is learned long before caution.

It is worth adding that caution here is practical rather than merely academic. A claim without a source cannot be repaired, so in the next edition it is usually simply repeated.

10. Croatian you can actually read, watch and listen to

Croatian has a full modern media ecosystem — this is one of the real advantages of learning it over a smaller language. Everything below is in Croatian.

Croatian media

Literature and film

Croatian literature is the part most worth the effort, and a learner reaches it earlier than they expect. Miroslav Krleža is the towering twentieth-century figure — Povratak Filipa Latinovicza and the Balade Petrice Kerempuha, the latter written in Kajkavian rather than the Shtokavian standard and therefore hard but extraordinary. Ivo Andrić, a Nobel laureate in 1961, is claimed by more than one national literature, which is itself instructive about the question in section 11. Ranko Marinković's Kiklop and Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić's Priče iz davnine — the latter a children's classic and a very good early reader — are both standard.

In film, Croatia's post-independence cinema is small but internationally visible; the Pula Film Festival, held in the Roman amphitheatre since 1954, is the country's principal showcase. For listening practice specifically, dubbed children's television is less useful than in larger markets because Croatia largely subtitles rather than dubs — which is itself part of why English proficiency is high, and which means Croatian-language original programming on HRT is where you should spend your time.

11. One language or four? The dispute, stated fairly

The facts nobody disputes: Standard Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin rest on the same Neo-Shtokavian (Eastern Herzegovinian) dialect base; they differ in the yat reflex, in a set of lexical preferences, and — for Serbian — in script, Cyrillic being used alongside Latin.⁴¹² Speakers understand one another without translation.

The pluricentric position holds that these are therefore variants of one polycentric standard language, in the way that German has Austrian and Swiss standards.¹⁶ The separate-standard position, reflected in official Croatian institutional practice and in the catalogue treatment of Croatian as a language in its own right, holds that a standard language is constituted by a community and its institutions rather than by mutual intelligibility alone.¹⁶

Both positions are held by serious people, and the disagreement is partly about facts and substantially about what the word "language" is for. This guide takes no side. It teaches Standard Croatian, names it, and notes that the naming is contested — which is the only position that does not conscript the learner into somebody's argument.

Reader C2 — Krležin jezik (Krleža's language)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not Croatian literature; section 12 lists real Croatian writing to move on to.

Ako želiš vidjeti koliko je hrvatski velik, ne čitaj gramatiku nego Krležu. Miroslav Krleža je pisao na standardu, ali je u Baladama Petrice Kerempuha pisao kajkavski, dakle ne na onom narječju na kojem počiva norma. Te su balade teške i za obrazovanoga Hrvata. Ipak ih mnogi drže vrhuncem hrvatske književnosti, i to nam nešto govori o tome što jezik zapravo jest.

— If you want to see how large Croatian is, do not read a grammar but Krleža. Miroslav Krleža wrote in the standard, but in the Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh he wrote in Kajkavian — that is, not in the dialect on which the norm rests. Those ballads are difficult even for an educated Croat. Nevertheless many hold them to be the summit of Croatian literature, and that tells us something about what a language actually is.

Norma je izbor. Netko je odabrao jedno narječje i od njega napravio standard, a druga su ostala izvan škole, ali nisu nestala. Kajkavski i čakavski i danas žive u kućama, u pjesmama, u imenima mjesta. Kada čitaš Krležu, čuješ jezik koji je stariji od norme i koji nije čekao da mu netko dopusti da postoji.

— The norm is a choice. Somebody selected one dialect and made a standard out of it, and the others were left outside the school, but they did not disappear. Kajkavian and Čakavian still live today in houses, in songs, in the names of places. When you read Krleža, you hear a language that is older than the norm and that did not wait for anyone's permission to exist.

Za stranca koji uči to je važna lekcija, i to na kraju puta a ne na početku. Prvo naučiš standard, jer bez njega ne možeš ništa. Ali kada dođeš do kraja knjige, dobro je znati da knjiga nije bila cijela zemlja nego samo put kroz nju. Iza standarda stoji stotinu godina odluka, i iza tih odluka stoje ljudi koji su govorili drukčije. Jezik koji si naučio je jedan glas u zboru, a ne cijeli zbor. Ako to znaš, znaš dovoljno, i možeš prestati čitati o hrvatskom i početi ga jednostavno čitati. A kada počneš čitati, vidjet ćeš da je jezik koji si učio bio samo vrata, i da je iza vrata bila cijela kuća.

— For a foreigner who is learning, that is an important lesson, and one for the end of the road rather than the beginning. First you learn the standard, because without it you can do nothing. But when you reach the end of the book, it is good to know that the book was not the whole country but only a path through it. Behind the standard stand a hundred years of decisions, and behind those decisions stand people who spoke differently. The language you have learned is one voice in a choir, not the whole choir. If you know that, you know enough, and you can stop reading about Croatian and start simply reading it.

11b. Sve ukratko — the whole guide, in Croatian

Everything this guide has argued, restated in Croatian, one paragraph per CEFR level, with the English underneath. If you can read this section without the captions, you have got what the guide was for.

A1 — Što je hrvatski

Hrvatski je slavenski jezik, a piše se latinicom od trideset slova. Gotovo svako slovo ima jedan glas, pa ako vidiš riječ, znaš je izgovoriti. To je velika prednost i to je najlakši dio. Ali dužina samoglasnika se ne piše, iako razlikuje riječi, a slovo r može biti cijeli slog bez samoglasnika: vrt, krv, prst. Riječi koje izgledaju nemoguće nisu nemoguće, samo izgledaju tako.

— Croatian is a Slavic language, and it is written with a Latin alphabet of thirty letters. Almost every letter has one sound, so if you see a word you know how to pronounce it. That is a great advantage and it is the easiest part. But vowel length is not written, although it distinguishes words, and the letter r can be a whole syllable without a vowel: vrt, krv, prst. Words that look impossible are not impossible, they only look that way.

A2 — Padeži

Hrvatski ima sedam padeža i tri roda, a nema članova. To znači da završetak riječi radi posao koji u engleskom rade redoslijed riječi i male riječi poput the i of. Ne možeš odgoditi padeže. Ali dobra je vijest da ih sveučilišni udžbenici obrađuju u prvih osam lekcija, dakle otprilike u jednom semestru. To je problem prve godine, a ne problem cijeloga života.

— Croatian has seven cases and three genders, and it has no articles. That means the ending of the word does the job that in English is done by word order and little words like the and of. You cannot postpone the cases. But the good news is that university textbooks cover them in the first eight lessons, that is roughly one semester. It is a first-year problem, not a lifetime one.

B1 — Naglasak i norma

Norma opisuje četiri naglaska, dva duga i dva kratka. To je opis koji stoji u knjigama. Ali jedan znanstveni rad iz 2019. tvrdi da mnogi govornici standarda taj sustav ne ostvaruju dosljedno, a u Zagrebu ima obrazovanih ljudi koji uopće nemaju tonove. Nauči gdje je naglasak, jer to vrijedi svugdje. Tonove nauči prepoznati, ali ne čekaj da ih savršeno izgovaraš prije nego progovoriš.

— The norm describes four accents, two long and two short. That is the description that stands in the books. But a 2019 research paper argues that many speakers of the standard do not realise that system consistently, and in Zagreb there are educated people who have no tones at all. Learn where the stress is, because that holds everywhere. Learn to recognise the tones, but do not wait until you pronounce them perfectly before you speak.

B2 — Jat i redoslijed riječi

Stari glas jat dao je u hrvatskom i bosanskom ije ili je, a u srpskom uglavnom e: mlijeko i mleko, lijep i lep, rijeka i reka. To nije razlika u rječniku nego pravilna zamjena, pa kada je jednom naučiš, mnogo srpskoga teksta postane providno. Redoslijed riječi je slobodan jer padeži nose gramatiku, pa red riječi nosi naglasak i novu obavijest.

— The old sound yat gave in Croatian and Bosnian ije or je, and in Serbian mostly e: mlijeko and mleko, lijep and lep, rijeka and reka. That is not a difference of vocabulary but a regular correspondence, so once you learn it, a lot of Serbian text becomes transparent. Word order is free because the cases carry the grammar, so word order carries emphasis and new information.

C1 — Tko odlučuje

U Hrvatskoj postoji institucija koja čuva normu, a njezin pravopis ima odobrenje ministarstva od 2013. godine. To je rijetko i to znači da pravilno u hrvatskom ima adresu. Ali institucija može odlučiti o pisanju, a ne može odlučiti kako ljudi govore. Zato u istoj zemlji postoje propisani naglasci i govornici koji ih nemaju, i to nije proturječje nego razlika između propisa i opisa.

— In Croatia there is an institution that guards the norm, and its orthography handbook has ministry approval from 2013. That is rare and it means that in Croatian "correct" has an address. But an institution can decide about writing, and it cannot decide how people speak. That is why in the same country there are prescribed accents and speakers who do not have them, and that is not a contradiction but the difference between prescription and description.

C2 — Jedan jezik ili četiri

Hrvatski, srpski, bosanski i crnogorski počivaju na istoj osnovi i ljudi se razumiju bez prevoditelja. Iz tih istih činjenica jedni zaključuju da je to jedan jezik s više standarda, a drugi da su to četiri jezika, jer jezik nije samo gramatika nego i zajednica. Ovaj vodič ne staje ni na jednu stranu. Uči jedan standard, imenuj ga, i pusti da ljudi sami imenuju svoj govor.

— Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin rest on the same base and people understand each other without translators. From those same facts one side concludes that it is one language with several standards, and the other that they are four languages, because a language is not only grammar but also a community. This guide takes neither side. Learn one standard, name it, and let people name their own speech themselves.

Glossary — Croatian used in this guide that is not on the deck

The readers are built from the deck, but six graded texts need connectives, abstract nouns and vocabulary specific to what each text is about. Every content word used that is not a deck card is listed here. Inflected forms of deck words — kavu for kava, vodu for voda, knjige for knjiga — are not repeated, since Croatian inflects everything and listing every case form would drown the useful information.

The same caveat applies as to the Breton guide. Deck words were harvested from a source and can be checked; the words below were supplied by the author, and although they are ordinary Croatian they have not been verified one by one against a dictionary entry. That is part of why this guide carries a review flag.

Glossary of non-deck Croatian used in this guide

12. Where this guide stops

• No full declension or conjugation tables. Seven cases across three genders and several declension classes, plus the verb system, require a reference grammar; Browne's chapter is the right one and its full text was not consulted for this build, so nothing has been reproduced from memory.⁹
• No systematic treatment of the Kajkavian and Čakavian dialect groups, which are not the basis of the standard but are spoken, written and — in Krleža's case — major literary vehicles.
• No verified verb-pair list. Aspect pairs are the single most useful thing a Croatian deck could add, and building one properly needs a lexicographic source rather than intuition.
• No community or specialist review of the Croatian prose in this guide.

13. Practice

14. Questions people actually ask

15. Where to go next

Graded reader — Purist za šankom

Postoji vrsta razgovora koja se u Hrvatskoj ponavlja s točnošću sata: netko izjavi da se jezik kvari, da mladi više ne znaju govoriti i da se nekad čitalo. Kaže se to uvijek s istim zadovoljnim negodovanjem, naslonjen na šank, i zaokruži se s «ma dobro, što ćeš» koje razoruža svaku raspravu prije nego što je počela. Moglo bi se odgovoriti; rijetko se isplati.

Zanimljivo je da onaj tko se najviše žali obično najviše i uživa u jeziku koji navodno brani. Isti čovjek koji prokazuje tuđice upravo ih je upotrijebio tri a da nije trepnuo, a onaj koji od drugih traži strogost poseže za besprijekornim aoristom kad mu odgovara i napušta ga čim se uzruja. U tome nema licemjerja, ili ne sasvim: postoji živ jezik koji posve normalno radi u ustima nekoga tko je uvjeren da prisustvuje njegovu sprovodu.

Ako me je slušanje tih prizora ičemu naučilo, to je da purizam gotovo uvijek gleda unatrag i nikada prema samome govorniku. Nitko ne smatra propadanjem ono što je naučio kao dijete; propast počinje, po definiciji, odmah nakon toga. A jezik međutim nastavlja raditi jedino što je oduvijek radio — mijenjati ruke, prilagođavati se poslu onoga tko se njime služi i udobno nadživljavati one koji ga oplakuju.

English

There is a kind of conversation that recurs in Croatia with clockwork accuracy: someone declares that the language is decaying, that young people can no longer speak, and that people used to read. It is always said with the same satisfied indignation, propped against the bar, and rounded off with a “well, what can you do” that disarms any argument before it has begun. One could reply; it is rarely worth it.

What is interesting is that whoever complains most usually also enjoys the language they claim to be defending most. The same man denouncing loanwords has just used three without blinking, and the one demanding rigour of others reaches for a flawless aorist when it suits him and abandons it the moment he gets agitated. There is no hypocrisy in it, or not entirely: there is a living language working perfectly normally in the mouth of someone convinced he is attending its funeral.

If listening to these scenes has taught me anything, it is that purism almost always looks backwards and never at the speaker himself. Nobody considers what they learned as a child to be decay; the decline begins, by definition, immediately afterwards. And meanwhile the language carries on doing the only thing it has ever done — changing hands, adapting to the trade of whoever uses it, and comfortably outliving those who mourn it.

• Croatian vocabulary — the full 337-term deck, with SRS trainerA1–B1 — Browsable as a table, with CSV / TSV / Anki / .apkg downloads. Identical to the table on this page.
• Institut za hrvatski jezikB2–C2 — The state language institute. Its Hrvatski pravopis is the orthography with sole ministry approval; the site also hosts searchable normative resources.
• HRT — Hrvatska radiotelevizijaB1–C2 — Television, radio and a large podcast archive. Dnevnik HRT is the standard evening news; studio narration makes it good listening practice.
• Jutarnji listB2–C2 — Daily newspaper, Zagreb, launched 1998. Extensive free online content across registers.
• Večernji listB2–C2 — Daily newspaper published in Zagreb and Mostar; one of the three leading Croatian dailies.
• Landau, Lončarić, Horga & Škarić — "Croatian", Illustrations of the IPAReference — The peer-reviewed reference description of the sound system, with a transcribed reading of The North Wind and the Sun.
• Glottolog — CroatianReference — Classification and reference list.