Croatian (hrvatski) is a South Slavic language which is used primarily in Croatia, by Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Croatian minorities in some neighbouring countries, in the Italian region of Molise, and parts of the Croatian diaspora worldwide.
Standard Croatian is dialectally based on the Western Å tokavian dialect with the Ijekavian reflex of the Common Slavic yat vowel. The Croatian linguistic area encompasses two other major dialects, ÄŒakavian and Kajkavian, which contribute lexically to the standard language. It is written with the Croatian alphabet, based on the Latin alphabet. Along with Serbian and Bosnian, Croatian belongs to the Central South Slavic diasystem (also referred to as “Serbo-Croatian”).
Književni (hrvatski) jezik (literally: (Croatian) book language ) is a common phrase that is used for Standard Croatian (both written and spoken). Književni jezik (literally: book language) is a common phrase for any standard language.
The modern Croatian standard language is a continuous outgrowth of more than nine hundred years of literature written in a mixture of Croatian Church Slavonic and the vernacular language. Croatian Church Slavonic was abandoned by the mid-15th century, and Croatian as embodied in a purely vernacular literature (Croatian literature) has existed for more than five centuries.