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Language Information

Serbian and Croatian are generally considered one language, combined under the single term Serbo-Croatian. The latter is the most important language of Yugoslavia, where it is spoken by about 8 million people, or about 80 percent of the population. The Serbs, however, call their language Serbian, and being of Eastern Orthodox religious persuasion, write it in a modified form of the Cyrillic alphabet. The Roman Catholic Croats, on the other hand, call their language Croatian and employ the Roman alphabet. Street signs and other inscriptions in Yugoslavia are generally written in both alphabets.

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For each Cyrillic letter in the Serbian alphabet there is a corresponding Roman letter in the Croatian alphabet.

Ivo Andricé was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Yugoslavia.

Family: Indo-European
Subgroup: Slavic
Branch: Southern

Writing Sample

Translation

The elephant came from Africa. Young, snappy, and not yet fully grown, he was but two years old. These details, as well as other information, had preceded the elephant into Travnik. Indeed, in Travnik everything was known: how he traveled, how he was looked after by his sizable escort, how he was transported and fed, and how he was received by the authorities along the way. And they referred to him by the Turkish word fil, which means elephant.

IVO ANDRIC, The Vizier's Elephant