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Language Information

Croatian is that form of Serbo-Croatian spoken by Yugoslavia's Croatian population and written in the Roman alphabet. Except for their scripts, Croatian and Serbian are really the same language, though a slightly different intonation or the use of a certain word will sometimes indicate whether one is a Serb or a Croat. For the word "train" the Serbs generally say voz as against Croatian viak, while for "dance" the Serbs prefer igra and the Croatians pies. For "music" the Serbs say muzika as against Croatian glazba, while for "theater" there is Serbian pozoriste and Croatian kazaliste. In each casc, however, both alternatives are understood perfectly well by everyone.

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The Croatian word for Croatian is hrvatski, and for Serbian srpski. The letter r frequently serves as a vowel, as for example in the words prst (finger), vrt (garden), krv (blood), brz (fast), crn (black), and trg (market). The Italian city of Trieste is spelled Trst in Croatia.

Austria, Croatia, Serbia.

Family: E. European

Writing Sample

Translation

Thus Philip sat in the twilight and listened to a stork clapping its beak like a castanet on a neighboring chimney, to the shepherds' voices echoing from the stream where they watered their beasts, to the swallows greedily circling around the chimney like birds of prey, and vividly and rapturously he felt flowing into him those multitudinous expressions of life. Images circled round him like birds, round his funeral mood and inner depression and round the vineyard and the plowfields, and the tracts of woodland fading in their heavy, velvety green, like old-fashioned damask, and disappearing in the vague brown tissue of the distance.

—MIROSLAV KRLEZA, The Return of Philip Latinovicz