section_path: Demographics/Languages
section_name: Languages
paragraph_text: Languages
  
  Croatian is the official language of the Republic of Croatia and has been an official language of the European Union since Croatia's accession in 2013. Croatian replaced Latin as the official language of the Croatian government in the 19th century. Following the Vienna Literary Agreement in 1850, the language and its Latin alphabet underwent reforms to create an unified "Croatian or Serbian" or " Serbo-Croatian " standard, which under various names became the official language of Yugoslavia. In SFR Yugoslavia, from 1972 to 1989, the language was constitutionally designated as the "Croatian literary language" and the "Croatian or Serbian language". It was the result of a resistance to and secession from "Serbo-Croatian" in the form of the Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language as part of the Croatian Spring. Since gaining independence in the early 1990s, the Republic of Croatia constitutionally designates the language as "Croatian language" and regulates it through linguistic prescription. The long-standing aspiration for development of its own expressions and thus enrichment of the language, as opposed to the adoption of foreign solutions in the form of loanwords, has been described by linguists as Croatian linguistic purism.
  
  Minority languages are in official use in local government units where more than a third of the population consists of national minorities or where local enabling legislation applies. Those languages are Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Serbian, and Slovak. The following minority languages are also recognised: Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, German, Hebrew, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Polish, Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Romani, Russian, Rusyn, Slovene, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
  
  According to the 2021 Census, 95.25% of citizens declared Croatian as their native language, 1.16% declared Serbian as their native language, while no other language reaches 0.26%. Croatian is a member of the South Slavic languages and is written using the Latin alphabet. There are three major dialects spoken on the territory of Croatia, with standard Croatian based on the Shtokavian dialect. The Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects are distinguished from Shtokavian by their lexicon, phonology and syntax.
  
  A 2011 survey revealed that 78% of Croats claim knowledge of at least one foreign language. According to a 2005 EC survey, 49% of Croats speak English as the second language, 34% speak German, 14% speak Italian, 10% speak French, 4% speak Russian and 2% speak Spanish. However several large municipalities support minority languages. A majority of Slovenes (59%) have some knowledge of Croatian. The country is a part of various language-based international associations, most notably the European Union Language Association.