Croatia Culture & Language

Eighty-three per cent of Croatians declared themselves Catholic in the 2021 census, and the Church's calendar -- Easter, All Saints, the patron saints' days of towns and islands -- is the public one. Croatian, in the Latin alphabet, is the national language and one of the European Union's official languages; along the Istrian coast it shares the road signs with Italian, the trace of a region that has always been mixed.

Regional identity is stronger than in most countries this size. Dalmatia has its own dialect and its klapa singing; Istria its own kitchen and its Italian inflection; Zagreb and the Slavonian plain the manners of Central Europe. The coast's Venetian centuries and the interior's Habsburg ones left different buildings, different food and different attitudes to time.

The war of 1991 to 1995 is the other formative fact. It is not a museum subject: the generation that fought it is in charge, the rebuilt towns are lived in, and a visitor who asks about it will be told, at length, with a directness that is a form of trust.

Croatian is the national official language and one of the official languages of the European Union, written in the Latin alphabet with a handful of accented letters -- č, ć, š, ž, đ -- that change a word's sound rather than decorate it. A visitor who reads the alphabet reads every sign; the hard part is the pronunciation, which is consistent once learned.

Along the Istrian coast the road signs are bilingual, Croatian and Italian, the visible trace of a region that has always been mixed; Italian is widely understood there. On the Dalmatian coast and in Zagreb, English is common in tourism and among younger people, and German nearly as much, a legacy of decades of Austrian and German visitors.

A few words go a long way: dobar dan (good day), hvala (thank you), molim (please, and you're welcome), da and ne for yes and no, and živjeli when a glass is raised.