Hrvatski književni jezik, ponajprije njim samim
Standard Croatian Language Described Primarily by Itself

Summary/Abstract: The author depicts the peculiarities of the standard Croatian language that no other language in the world has in respect of its historic development, the treatment of its dialects, as well as regarding its phonetic, grammatical, lexical and stylistic levels. The author also shows that in both its usage and codified norms – and norm is the only criterion that determines standard languages – there is no other language like Croatian in the world. We can therefore speak of the standard Croatian language as a specific South-Slavic, Slavic and world language. Croatian can be said to be identical with Serbian, under the name Serbo-Croatian, only if one neglects some important facts that must by no means be neglected in a scientific analysis. The same goes for the suggestion that Croatian is a variant of Serbo-Croatian, or that Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are merely variants of the same language, in which case variant is used as a polysemic and thus scientifically insufficiently defined term. One of the arguments supporting the sameness of these languages is their comprehensibility. The author argues that comprehensibility cannot be a criterion for the sameness, and as far as the comprehensibility between Serbian and Croatian is concerned the author shows that it is not absolute and that misunderstandings can sometimes cause multimillion damages.

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