The following article “Croatian Language from the Eleventh Century to the Computer Age”  is an introduction to volume 25-26 (1984-85) of the Journal of Croatian Studies, dedicated to Croatian language. It was written by Karlo Mirth, Journal's Managing Editor.

The words “Zvonimir Kral Hrvatski” (Zvonimir Croatian King) are part of a thirteen-line inscription in the then contemporary Croatian language chiseled on the white limestone tablet dated from about 1100 A.D. and known as Bascanska Ploca — the Tablet of Baska — after a locality on the island of Krk where it was located. The term hrvatski (Croatian), referring to both the people and its language has been used ever since.

The scriptory media in which Croatian was written changed. The Tablet of Baska was in Glagolitic script as there were numerous missals, breviaries, hagiographies, charters, diplomas, lyrics, secular novels and other texts. Other equally numerous inscriptions, were in Cyrillic; for example the XIIIth century register of lands belonging to the Benedictine Monastery of St. John at Povlje on the island of Brac and the oldest preserved manuscript of the Statute of Poljica (cca. 1440), It has been recorded that Nikola Jurisic, the supreme commander of the Military Frontier and the legendary defender of the Hungarian city of Köszeg against the Turks in 1532, used the Croatian language as a member of an Austrian diplomatic mission to Sultan Süleyman II, and also that he “wrote only in Croatian and then in the Cyrillic script.” Marko Marulic (1450-1524), a famous humanist from Split, whose books in Latin and their translations into Italian, French, Portuguese, German, and Czech were printed in about three dozen editions in a period of about 170 years after his death, wrote also in Croatian. In a 1501 introduction to his epic Judita (Judith), which was printed in Venice in 1521 he noted that it was “u versih hrvacki slozena” (written in Croatian verses). Judita was printed in Roman script which increasingly prevailed from that time and is used today.

Quantity and quality of books published in Croatian from XXIth to XIXth century is impressive. The minuscule republic of Dubrovnik and her outstanding writers, such as Marin Drzic (1508-1567), Ivan Gundulic (1589-1638), and Jurije Palmotic (1605-1657), to mention only a few, held a decisive role in the development of Croatian literary language. There were at the same time numerous translations of world classics into Croatian. Dinko Zlataric, a poet from Dubrovnik, translated Sophocles’ tragedy Electra, Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe, and Tasso’s Aminta. On the title-page of these translated works published in Venice in 1597 it was indicated that they were “iz vechie tugieh iezika a Harvackij izloxenie" (translated from several foreign languages into Croatian). Incidentally, Zlataric's first translation of Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta was published in 1580, only seven years after its first presentation in Ferrara in Italy.

Croatian literature participated in all the major European artistic and intellectual movements from the Renaissance and the Reformation to the contemporary currents. No other South Slavic nation, except perhaps the Slovenes, was as deeply rooted in European trends. In this context, the Protestant Croatian-language books printed by a printing press at Urach near Tübingen in Germany are of special interest.

Various terms have been applied to Croatian language over the centuries. It was also known as Slavic, Illyrian and Dalmatian, The terms Slavic or Slavonic were broad terms that referred to the Slavic stature of the Croats. The Illyrian name derives from the Illyrians, the pre-Roman and Roman inhabitants of the western Balkans, this name being revived in the Renaissance as part of the general enthusiasm for the ancients. In similar vein, the term Dalmatian derived from the Roman province of Dalmatia, this term also being fostered by Venice. Some of the Croatian writers, for example Marko Marulic, called their mother tongue simply Croatian (hrvatski) when writing in the vernacular. The same authors tended to call their native tongue either Illyrian or Dalmatian when writing in Latin for foreign audiences. Others often used these terms as synonyms for Croatian. Hence Filip Grabovac’s book title Cvit razgovora naroda i jezika ilirickoga aliti arvackoga (Best Instruction of Illyrian or Croatian People and Language), published in 1747 at Venice. It is perhaps worth noting that Venice confiscated Grabovac’s book and threw the author in jail because he criticized the Venetian rule in Dalmatia, saying that the Croats were not much better off under Venice than their compatriots were under the Turks in Bosnia. And indeed, the banning of books and periodicals —very often on the question of language — has been in practice in Grabovac’s homeland from his days until now, including most recently, in 1971, the destruction of 40,000 copies of Hrvatski pravopis (Croatian Orthography).

One of the controversial aspects of the Croatian language question has been the relationship between Croatian and Serbian. In appellation, the Croatian language has been linked to Serbian only the second half of the XIXth century. Five Croatian writers, two Serbian philologists, and one Slovenian linguists in Vienna in 1850 and signed the so-called "Vienna Literary Convention." This was a manifesto calling for the creation of a common language for all Croats and all Serbs. The most outstanding Croatian linguists of the period, such as Ljudevit Gaj did not take part in the proceedings, while Ivan Mazuranic, the most prominent of the Croatian signatories, renounced the stipulations of that Convention in 1862. Nevertheless, the idea of linguistic rapprochement with the Serbs was promoted by some prominent Croats as a good foundation for a cultural and possibly political unification of the South Slavs. In this spirit, Josip Juraj Strossmayer, a prominent Croatian philanthropist and Catholic bishop of Djakovo, established the South Slav Academy of Sciences and Arts — Jugoslovenska Akademija Znanosti i Umjetnosti in 1866 at Zagreb. In 1880, the Academy began to publish Rjecnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (A Dictionary of the Croatian or Serbian Language), which was completed in 1976.

The terminology for the incongruous linguistic dualism / unitarism became correspondingly complex. What started out as hrvatski ili srpski (Croatian or Serbian) subsequently became hrvatsko-srpski (Croato-Serbian ), srpsko-hrvatski (Serbo-Croatian), or srpskohrvatski (Serbocroatian). The last term was advanced by Serbian-dominated governments of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, established in 1918 (the country’s name was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929). Serbian linguistic practices were pushed throughout Yugoslavia by means of the military, civil administration, and educational policy. This was a part of coordinated efforts by the overall policy of Serbianization.

During World War II, which for both Croats and Serbs was simultaneously a cruel civil war, Croats called their language Croatian and Serbs referred to their language as Serbian; this regardless of which belligerent side or national, political and ideological barriers they found themselves. Significantly, in the midst of the war, the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia, at the Jajce session of November 29-30, 1943, recognized the equality of four official languages of Yugoslavia: Serbian, Croatian, Slovene, and Macedonian. These principles were implemented by the postwar Yugoslav government of Marshal Tito. Hence, the S1uzbeni List Federativne Narodne Republike Jugoslavije (Official Gazette of the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia) indicated under the title that it was being published simultaneously in Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Macedonian. At the adoption of the Yugoslav constitution in 1946 the first part was read in Serbian, the second in Croatian, and the third and fourth in Slovenian and Macedonian respectively. The National Bank of Yugoslavia in a decree issued 1947 stipulated that the bills shall carry texts in four corners in four languages: Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian. The clause regarding the falsification had to be printed on each bill in all four languages.

As years passed these principles were increasingly bypassed, and ignored. The same policies, methods, and channels that were used by the prewar Belgrade government, were revived, Serbian became once again the equivalent of the state language of the Federative Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. In 1954 twenty-five Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin writers and linguists, meeting at Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina, passed a resolution calling for the publication of a common Serbocroatian/Croatoserbian orthography and a common Serbocroatian/Croatoserbian dictionary. The agreement was reached under political pressure. The pretext of developing a common language was viewed as an additional instrument of a calculated policy whereby the Serbian language was in practice being imposed on the non-Serbs.

In 1971, under very different political circumstances, the Croats renounced the Novi Sad Agreement entirely. Having concluded that the Croatian language was being degraded to the status of a local dialect, eighteen Croatian scholarly institutions published The Declaration Concerning the Name and Position of Croatian Literary Language in March 1967. Among the signatories were three institutes of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts. The Declaration acknowledged that the Croatian and Serbian languages have the same linguistic basis, but pointed out that the Croatian literary language is not identical to the Serbian literary language. After 1971, when many of the gains made by the Croat reformers during the period from 1966 to 1971 were seriously compromised, there has been relatively little tinkering with the language issue. In a sense, it is no longer intellectually and politically respectable to challenge the legitimacy of the Croatian language.

The linguistic medium that the Croats brought with them to the Adriatic shores at the dawn of barbarian Europe has undergone many changes over the centuries. Certainly the complexity of Croatian dialectal situation — the three principal dialects of stokavian, cakavian, and kajkavian, each with a developed literary tradition — has slowed down the emergence of a single Croatian linguistic standard. Nevertheless, even in terms of the growth of the present-day literary standard the stokavian solution predated the Illyrianist movement of the 1830s and completed the trend started by the poets of Dubrovnik, through Andria Kacic Miocic and Bosnian Franciscans, to Ante Kuzmanic and Ljudevit Gaj. In a real way, the line of continuity from the Tablet of Baska to the computer age has never been broken.

K.M.