Croatian grammar

Feeling that the available materials on Croatian grammar in foreign languages are deficient, I got the idea to create a website where I try my own hand at supplying what's missing. The stuff that is available in English is usually aimed at learners, whereas my aim is purely technical, linguistic description (not that it can't help a learner, if I do my job well enough). Even worse, a lot of material that I've come across over time, even when done by serious linguists, has omissions and even gross mistakes. Admittedly, my own attempt will contain mistakes too, but at least I won't be paid for doing a bad job.

Croatian?

The very concept of "Croatian" language may be deemed problematic by many non-natives. Traditionally (across the 20th century, at least), this was considered to be a part of "Serbo-Croatian" language. Today, the views on the unity or disunity of the language, whether it is indeed "Serbo-Croatian" or just several different languages (Bosnian/Bosniak, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian) are determined mostly by one's nationality and general political views. I don't intend to pass any strict judgment in this area. As the languages are dialectally strongly connected, I will use any data and material that I find useful or relevant to any part of my description. The core and primary aim will be Croatian, including its non-standard elements that are omitted from standard Serbo-Croatian and Croatian grammars, and which are necessarily quite different from non-standard phenomena in the other three countries. I will describe those non-Croatian phenomena too whenever I feel like it, but I expect the overall result to be Croatian-focused. Either way, this page is not meant to be a methodologically rigid study, but merely a place to write about things that interest me regarding my native language and whatever related stuff catches my attention.

Bibliography

For a start, I'll compile a chronological bibliography of existing Croatian and BCMS grammar books, both native and foreign ones, with links to their digitally-available versions where legal (usually public domain, sometimes recent publications that have been put online by the publisher). A lot of crap is bound to end up on the list, of course.

• Bartol Kašić (Bartholomaeo Cassio): Institutionum linguae illyricae libri duo. ¹1604, ²2002 (with Croatian translation by Sanja Perić Gavrančić, also on retrogram site), ³2005 (with Croatian translation by Zvonko Pandžić, labelled as "2. izd." for unclear reasons).
• Вук Сефановић Караџић: Српска граматика, in: Српски рјечник, истолкован њемачким и латинским ријечма. 1818 (omitted in the 1852 edition of the dictionary which is the basis of the later editions, but the 1818 ed. has been reprinted too, e.g. in 1969).
• Pero Budmani (Pietro Budmani): Grammatica della lingua serbo-croata (illirica). 1867.
• Tomo (Tomislav) Maretić: Gramatika i stilistika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga književnog jezika. ¹1899, ²1931, ³1963 (Gramatika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga književnog jezika, edited by Mate Hraste and Pavle Rogić; without Stilistika, as can be seen from the new title).
• Josip Florschütz: Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika: za ženski licej, preparandije i više pučke škole. ¹1905, ²1907, ³1916, ⁴1921, ⁵1940 (Gramatika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika: za srednje i slične škole, edited by Stjepan Ivšić), ⁶1941 (Hrvatska slovnica, this is actually just the remnants of the ⁵1940 print run with a new cover and a list of corrections to the text, to bring the text in line with the fascist state ideology (Samardžija 1993:23-25)), ⁷1943, ⁸2002 (reprint of ³1916 with afterword by Ranko Matasović).
• August Leskien: Grammatik der serbo-kroatischen Sprache (1. Teil: Lautlehre, Stammbildung, Formenlehre). 1914.
• Степанъ Михайловичъ Кульбакинъ: Сербскій языкъ. Фонетика и морфологія сербскаго языка. 1915¹, 1917². (ссылка на 2-е издание)
• Antoine Meillet, André Vaillant: Grammaire de la langue serbo-croate. 1924, 1952, 1969, 1980(?).
• Ivan Brabec, Mate Hraste, Sreten Živković: Gramatika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika. ¹1952, ²1954, ³1958 (Gramatika hrvatskosrpskoga jezika), ⁴1961, ⁵1963, ⁶1965, ⁷1966, ⁸1968, ⁹1970. (Since ²1954 contains a (at the time) decent and systematic overview of accentual types, allegedly done by Bratoljub Klaić. In ⁴1961 they've removed the OCS grammar sketch.)
• Ljudevit Jonke: Suvremeni naš književni jezik. 2023. Originally compiled from Jonke's lectures by Danijel Alerić in 1956.
• Stjepko Težak, Stjepan Babić: Pregled gramatike hrvatskosrpskog jezika. 1966, ⁵1972, ⁶1973 (Pregled gramatike hrvatskoga književnog jezika), ⁷1992 (Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika), ¹⁶2007, ¹⁸2016.
• Zlatko Vince: Novi gramatički priručnik za osmogodišnje škole, Jezik, g. 15 (1967-1968), br. 2 (the linked scan is incomplete)
• Josip Hamm: Kratka gramatika hrvatskosrpskog književnog jezika za strance. 1969.
• Eugenija Barić, Mijo Lončarić, Dragica Malić, Slavko Pavešić, Mirko Peti, Vesna Zečević, Marija Znika: Priručna gramatika hrvatskoga književnog jezika. 1979, 1990 (Gramatika hrvatskoga književnog jezika), 1995 (Hrvatska gramatika), 2003. (Danijel Alerić and Valentin Putanec also credited for accentuation in 1979 edition.)
• Josip Silić, Ivo Pranjković: Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika: za gimnazije i visoka učilišta. 2005, 2006.
• Adnan Čirgić, Josip Silić, Ivo Pranjković: Gramatika crnogorskoga jezika. 2010. Basically a new edition of Silić-Pranjković 2005, with new section on phonology (A.Č.) and modifications in morphology (J.S.).
• Paul-Louis Thomas, Vladimir Osipov: Grammaire du bosniaque, croate, monténégrin, serbe. 2012.