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(this is just a draft)
This is one of "extra" chapters: things you don’t really need to speak Croatian, but it could help you understand some features in spoken and written Croatian as it is.
Croatia is not a remote island, it has been open to influences from other cultures for a very long time. While influences before the 1950’s are best described in the history of the language – a chapter that’s still under construction – everyhing in the second half of the 20th century and in the 21st century is still an ongoing process. Still, I’ll touch briefly here the period in the first half of the 20th century as well.
When you are in contact with other countries and cultures, there’s an exchange of people, things and ideas. Since Croatia is small in absolute terms, and undeveloped in relation to the countries to the west and north of it, that exchange was mainly exporting people and importing things and ideas. Most things were invented elsewhere and simply imported into Croatian lands, and along these things, words from them. Some of the obvious examples from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century are words like:
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auto m car dizajn design film movie |
kino movie theater tenis tennis vikend weekend |
The sources were German and English, but also other languages: žilet razor was borrowed from the American brand name Gillette, but pronounced in the French way (as in many others languages in Europe).
Words for some inventions were taken from more than one source, the chief example is the word for sport. It has been taken both from English and from German. The problem was that Germans have adapted the word to the German pronuciation rules, where you basically can’t start words with sp-. So there were two versions of the word in the 20th century:
| šport | sport |
The version with š- completely dominated in the 1st half of the 20th century, while the version with s- dominated in the second; since the late 20th century, there has been a bit of a comeback of the version šport, but the version with s- is more common today. This is what Google™ says, in millions:
| šport | 1 |
| sport | 68 |
You will, occassionally, see the alternative version. (Historically, there were more such pairs, such as študent / student, but there the versions without š- have prevailed long ago.)
Since 1950’s, with the rise of modern media – from TV to Facebook – there has been a large influx of new things and behaviors from US and UK. And with these new words, there was a question: should they be respelled according to the pronunciation, or left in their original (i.e. English) spelling?
Various style manuals repeat that such words should be respelled if they have ‘established’ in Croatia and don’t feel "foreign’ anymore. But what does it actually mean? How do you know when something doesn’t ‘feel’ foreign anymore?
Five styles of music are nice examples: jazz, rock, blues, dance and pop. The first three terms originated in the US, while the last two have a less straightforward history. The first term has been present in Croatia for more than a century, the second one for more than 6 decades, so you would expect they are well ‘established’, but Google™ again says, on the Croatian Internet domain, in thousands:
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You can see the same for the other terms: the spelling blues is some 60 times more common than bluz, and so on. With the word pop, there was no adaptation – the word was pronouced like a native word from the day one.
There are more words that usually appear in the original spelling, despite some being used for decades:
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jeans / džins (7000 x) show / šou (20 x) |
(I’ve written how many times the original spelling is more common in parentheses.)
Now, you might ask me a very hard question: why was the word for weekend adapted completely to the Croatian spelling, while the words for music styles, like jazz and rock, or the word show weren’t? I can only speculate, and three reasons come to my mind. First, it could be that only few people write about jazz and rock, and there are specialized magazines for them, while what will be going on over the next weekend, the weather forecast for the weekend is of a much wider interest. Second, it could be an influence of something very popular: there was a popular magazine Vikend, focusing on singers, actors, movies, free time, and its name could have influenced spelling a lot.
There’s one more possibility – that the word for weekend was not borrowed from English at all, but from Czech, where it’s spelled víkend. If you’re puzzled how Croatian could have borrowed a word from Czech, actually Czech had a huge influence on Croatian, and besides a lot of words, Croatian has borrowed, in the 19th century, the letters č, š and ž from Czechs, who invented them in the Middle Ages. (Again, these are just my ideas why some spellings are adapted and others aren’t – we really don’t know.)
However, there are some words where the Croatian spelling completely prevails, such as:
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intervju (») / interview (66 x) |
The word intervju (») is end-stressed (in the ‘western’ scheme) and like kanu, the -u is never removed, so you’ll see u intervjuu; each -u- is a separate syllable, i.e. in-ter-vju-u.
All examples so far were nouns. With verbs, adjectives and adverbs, the situation is a bit different.
Verbs have to be adapted somehow, because verbs have specific endings for the infinitive and other forms; for over a century, the main way to adapt foreign verbs was to simply add -ati and make a perfectly regular verb. Some examples are:
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štrajkati strike (as a union of workers) ® bildati bodybuild ® |
The first verb illustrates an important fact: while (according to Wikipedia) the English verb strike has 18 currently used meanings, it has been borowed into Croatian in only one, specialized meaning. Actually, the word strike was first borrowed into German in the specialized meaning; from there, the noun štrajk was borrowed into Croatia, and finally, a verb was created from it. The other verb was borrowed only in a specialized meaning too.
Another way to adapt verbs, a bit less common, is to add -irati («); the verb gets a stress shift in the present tense in the standard scheme. Some examples are:
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čipirati («) tag (an animal) skenirati («) scan (using a scanner) |
There are many verbs in this group that have been taken from German, such as parkirati («) park (a car).
As you can see, spelling of verbs which have been used for decades is always adapted.
With adjectives, they are usually simply taken over and at first become indeclinable (i.e. have only one form); their spelling is usually adapted, for example (in thousands):
| fer | 4100 |
| fair | 136 |
Examples showing how this adjective never gets any endings are phrases like fer cijena fair price and fer uvjeti fair conditions. More such adjectives are:
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ekspres instant |
mini seksi |
These adjectives are more naturalized and respelled as often (or more) than written in the original way. Also, they don’t have comparative or superlative forms, but they can have ‘too much’ forms (e.g. preseksi too sexy).
Gradually, if an adjective is frequently used, it has a chance to become completely naturalized and behave like any long-established adjective – endings and all. This happened, in speech to the formerly indeclinable adjective roza pink, which became rozi and behaves like any regular adjective. Interestingly, some style manuals and web pages oppose such use, because dictionaries list only the indeclinable form! Apparently, some people never understood languages change over decades and centuries. (This is, actually, a sign that the language is still strong and can impose native patterns on foreign words and absorb them completely.)
The adjective rozi is sometimes transformed into comparative (roziji) or superlative.
Now we come to how people improvise when people who learn about something new in English, but can’t figure what the corresponding Croatian word would be – maybe there isn’t any with that precise meaning, it’s not clear if there’s a suitable metaphor. Then they simply take the English word. Nouns are usually spelled like in English, but get normal endings, like in this example (I’ve taken it from the Internet, this a statement by a government official):
Ista osoba ne smije u drive-inu naplaćivati i posluživati hranu.
The same person in a drive-in should not take money and serve food.
(This is not a very precise translation, as naplaćivati ~ naplatiti means giving a receipt for goods or services – possibly provided by someone else – and getting them paid by either cash, cards or some other way of payment. Maybe there’s an exact English translation, but I can’t guess it.)
Another example is piercing / pirsing (the original spelling is 12 times more common).
Adjectives and adverbs are treated in the same way. Adjectives become indeclinable; for example (again from the Internet):
U Osijeku se sprema prvi veliki stand-up spektakl
The first great stand-up show is getting ready in Osijek
The word spektakl means something bigger than a mere show; it’s something spectacular but one more time it’s hard for me to find the right English word! Often there are no exact equivalents in other languages.
People simply take words from other languages because life is too short, dictionaries lack many words, and sometimes there are no exact or established translations for some terms at all. Sometimes, the only realistic option is to improvise and just leave the word essentially untranslated. An example is show: the corresponding Croatian word hasn’t been invented so far.
(Also, note how we actually have a big spectacle in the example above, not an ordinary spectacle. This is because some words wear down, don’t draw attention anymore, and people have to invent new ways of drawing attention, sometimes using words like awesome, but also by taking words from other languages.)
Verbs are borrowed because there’s a lack of metaphor, or people aren’t sure which existing verb can be reused in the new meaning. One example is saving a file on a computer (or mobile phone), and other verbs related to technology:
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sejvati save (a file) printati print (from a computer) guglati search (using Google™) |
Gradually, native verbs are being used more and more to express this meaning, so today spremati ~ spremiti is also used to express this meaning (for more about this verb pair, check 86 More Verbs and Standing Outcomes).
Verbs are adapted by adding -ati and, when written, sometimes respelled according to how Croatians think they should pronounce the word, but with verbs related to technology and special areas, the original spelling prevails:
| update (software) | apdejtati | 800 |
| updeatati | 2600 | |
| download (a file) | daunlodati | 135 |
| downloadati | 12000 |
This could look like a weird hybrid, but standard Croatian spelling requires original spelling of personal names, even when getting Croatian endings (recall Shakespeareov, introduced way back in 19 Your, Ana’s: Possessives) so mixed spellings aren’t that unusual.
The verb downloadati is also becoming less common, and it’s mostly used by specialists, as most people have repurposed this native verb pair for the new meaning:
skidati ~ skinuti (skine) take off
This pair has been usually used to express taking down what was ‘on’ – either clothes someone is wearing or some box from a top shelf – but today it also expresses ‘taking down’ files and applications from the Internet.
Verbs related to everyday life or common interests are usually respelled:
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like (on a social network) | lajkati ® | 51000 |
| likeati | 200 | |
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fake (make a false display) | fejkati ® | 6000 |
| fakeati | 10 |
These two verbs illustrate that people, when they can’t find an exact equivalent in Croatian, simply borrow the English verb and adapt it. However, the result is not some mixed English-Croatian language, as Croatian grammar, endings, word order is always observed. It sometimes leads to sentences and texts with a lot of English words (check the Examples below).
You can also use English words because they are cool: an English word can draw attention, make something more interesting, and so on. This is how some adjectives and adverbs are taken, for example cool (cool or kul), full (full or ful) and actually (also ekšuli or ekšli); here’s an example from the Internet:
ekšli je pričala s ljudima iz prvih redova she actually talked to people from the front rows (lit. ‘first rows’)
(Recall that the adjective prvi is sometimes used when English would use front, in e.g. front line or front row.)
The word cool is the most used of these: it’s used by schools and even govermnent to promote projects for kids; for example, there’s a project called knjiga je cool a book is cool, promoting reading books in elementary schools.
For such words, both spellings are used, but the English one still dominates (in thousands):
| cool | 4100 |
| kul | 503 |
Finally, many people got an idea to make Croatian words fancier by using English-like spellings: we can call it "fancification". Just a few examples are:
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Beertija after birtija tavern Kooglana after kuglana bowling alley |
(For more examples, check the Examples section below.)
Of course, you can simply use English names; for example, the two main shopping malls in Zagreb are named City Center One. However, this is just full, plain English; a fancy Croatian-English mix seems to be more cool.
I’ve explained almost everything you need to know – the next chapter, the last one, is about certain things you don’t really need to know!
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® In Serbia, verbs that are adapted with -ati get a different suffix:
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štrajkovati (štrajkuje) strike (as a union of workers) bildovati (builduje) bodybuild lajkovati (lajkuje) like (on a social network) fejkovati (fejkuje) fake (make a false display) |
This is one instance where the spontaneous evolution of language in Croatia and Serbia follows different paths.
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