CroLang Editors gratefully acknowledge the help of Mr. Gary L. Giblin, who kindly provided the linguistic information for this page, the alphabet transcription, and improved the style and grammar. 1/97
The Croatian language employs the Latin (or Roman) alphabet. All 30 letters are listed below.
As you can see, several of the Croatian letters are not "international". Of course, some word processors and other software applications provide Croatian fonts , including the letters with diacritics (e.g., the "hachek"). Still, when using such common applications as vi-editor and e-mail, you will have to rely upon what is universally available, namely, a basic set of ASCII characters.
There are at least two ways of handling the diacritics:
- Ignore them. In most cases, this causes no problems in (mis)understanding Croatian words, especially for native speakers.
- Use other Latin characters to represent the Croatian letters with diacritics, thus permitting a distinction between "c with a hachek" and plain "c". eg. "ch" instead of
Please note that in non-electronic communications one should use the regular letters from the alphabet.
The rules of pronunciation (with examples)are also available.
