Croatian language policy: Establishing national identity in the era of globalization

Since their country’s independence in 1991, Croatian linguists and policy makers have faced the challenge of asserting a linguistic identity for the new nation while adapting to the economic and political realities of a globalizing era. In 1850 an agreement linking Croatian with Serbian-for both political and linguistic reasons-was concluded in Vienna. For nearly a century and a half afterwards some Croatians advocated a distinct Croatian while “unitarists” sought to merge the languages completely. The controversy intensified in the 1980s, becoming a factor in the centrifugal politics of that era (Bugarski 1989, quoted in Bugarski 1995). Upon independence, a primary goal of many Croatian scholars and some Croatian officials was to undo the marriage of the two South Slavic languages (Kačić 2001; Pavletić 1997).