Croatian - Worldwide Distribution

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Distribution Croatian► Interactive map

Development from the Slavic language

Picture Symbol image: Alphabet The Croatian language has its roots in Slavic, which was brought to the Balkan region by the Slavs in the 6th and 7th centuries. The historical development of Croatian can be divided into several phases. Old Croatian emerged from the 9th to the 12th century, during which time the first Glagolitic inscriptions were created. Croatian writing culture continued to develop in the Middle Ages, supported by the ecclesiastical and political use of the language.

With the arrival of the Renaissance and humanism in Europe, a period of intensive literary and linguistic development began. Marko Marulić, a 16th century poet and humanist, is often referred to as the father of Croatian literature. During this period, Croatian was increasingly used in a variety of documents and literary works.

The 19th century was a key period for the standardization of Croatian. The cultural and political movement of Illyrianism aimed to create a uniform written language for all southern Slavs, with Croatian playing a leading role. Orthography was standardized and Croatian developed its own literary form, which was different from that of Serbian.

CountryRegionOfficial languageDistributionTotal
CroatiaSouthern Europeyes91.4 %3,534,000
Bosnia and HerzegovinaSouthern Europeno28.8 %911,000
AustriaWestern Europeno1.6 %147,000
SwitzerlandWestern Europeno1.4 %126,000
HungaryEastern Europeno0.9 %86,000
SloveniaSouthern Europeno3.2 %68,000

Differences between Croatian and Serbo-Croatian

While the language was considered a uniform language for Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Montenegrins during the existence of Yugoslavia, the differences today are both political and linguistic. After the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin were promoted as independent standard languages. The differences lie mainly in pronunciation, spelling and some of the vocabulary, with Croatian having numerous loan words from Italian and German that do not occur in Serbian.

Unless otherwise described in the text, this page is about native speakers — not the total number of speakers. How many people understand or speak Croatian as a subsequently learned language is not the subject of this page. Countries where native speakers make up only a few thousand, or even a few hundred people, or countries with a percentage well below 1% are unlikely to be listed here.

Official language, national language or lingua franca: explanation of frequently used terms

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