Croatian is a South Slavic language spoken most commonly by Croats in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The current structure of the language is a combination of Croatian Church Slavonic and the lingua franca, which has been evolving since a millennium. Its history has been somewhat complex due to a few notable events that have affected the language.
The Old Church Slavonic was considered as the language of liturgy during the 9th century. As a result one could trace the Croatian documents simply by looking at the religious transcripts. The language, with time, gained impetus and was used for non-liturgical purposes as a result of the influence of religion in Croatia and other parts of the world. It was during this time that the Croatian language discovered its identity as opposed to its general Slavonic nature and was dominant until the 16th century. Gradually, the documents written entirely in Croatian came to sight and were accepted and pure Croatian started getting recognized. The modern Croatian emerged during the 14th and 15th centuries although the Old Slavonic continued to hold prominence until the 16th century.
During the 17th century, the semi-autonomous Croatia was under the reign of two domestic prince dynasties. They tried to unite both cultural and linguistic levels and chose an official language for the country. This language went on to become the administrative language and all key documents were written in this official language. However, the Austrian influences affected the way in which the Croatian language was flourishing and the language therefore took four more centuries to settle because of its strange complications of being a ‘three dialect’ and ‘three script’ language.
In the 19th century, due to bureaucratic reasons, a Serbo-Croatian language was born. This unification produced more Serbs than Croats as the language had a more Serbian influence than that of Croatian. This continued until the 20th century and affected the purity of the Croatian language. Despite the efforts of linguists and writers to salvage the language, the suppression continued, and was also used as a political tool to hold back the Croats themselves.
In 1967, few scholarly institutions and cultural organizations dealing with language and literature, including leading Croatian writers and linguists, came forward and issued the “Declaration Concerning the Name and Status of the Croatian Literary Language” seeking amendment to the constitution acknowledging parity between the Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian languages, along with the use of Croatian in Schools and media. This long standing declaration finally brought an end to the forced Serbo-Croatian unification.
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