Elementary (and Slightly Silly) Croatian Quiz

Answer: All of these

From 1919 to 1987, all of these regions including Croatia (along with Slovenia and Macedonia, whose languages are more distinct) were part of Yugoslavia (originally called the "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes"), a federation of South Slavic peoples created after World War One. Though there was often peaceful coexistence between these peoples, especially under the strict (and often despotic) governance of Marshall Tito from 1945 to 1980, tension between the various ethnicities was evident at other times, culminating in civil wars in the 1940s and 1990s. Since what appears to be the "final" division of Yugoslavia in 1995, the dialects which used to constitute a relatively homogenous Serbo-Croatian language have become more distinct, often being taught these days as separate languages.

Answer: False

Like the Czech and Polish Slavs, the Croats have historically been Roman Catholic. One sign of this affinity has been the almost exclusive use of the Latin alphabet, the same script used by most English speakers - albeit with some unique accent marks.

Answer: Hrvatski

"Magyar" is the language of Hungary, "Debeo" is the Croatian word for "fat", and "Crotsch" is a word I made up.

Answer: False

Unlike English, Croatian makes great use of case endings, i.e. the changing of a noun to indicate its role in a sentence. For this reason, linguists called Croatian an "inflected" language, as opposed to English, which is a "syntactic" language because it depends on prepositions and word order. For English speakers, forming cases is one of the hardest things to master when learning an inflected language. Croatian does have prepositions, but they can often be omitted, especially in informal language.

Answer: How are you?

The word "vi" is the formal pronoun for "you" in Croatian. Since this is the only pronoun that can be used with the verb "ste", it is sometimes left out, and you will often hear Croats greet each other with a simple "Kako ste?"

Answer: Volim te

"Volim te" means "I love you", which is probably appropriate in this situation. "Tvoja mata je usijana" translates loosely as: "Your mom is red-hot." I doubt the young lady would want to hear that!

Answer: Gdje je policija?

This phrase, as you might expect, means: "Where are the police?" The others translate as follows: "Da li je tvoja kola crvena?" = "Is your wagon red?"; "Koliko spavac´ih soba imate?" = "How many bedrooms do you have?"; "Je li vam dao kavu?" = "Did he give you coffee?" I think you will agree that these questions are of little use to the typical crime victim.

Answer: The Empire Strikes Back

Translation: "No, Luke, I am your father." Note that I omitted the silent "e" from "Luke". There are no silent letters in Croatian, nor are there any ambiguities in pronunciation; what you see is what you get.

Answer: The Matrix

This is the Croatian version of "There is no spoon", a popular line from this post-modern film.

Answer: Who's your daddy?

It is interesting to note that Croatian does not use contractions like English. Verbs must be written out, though it is often fine to drop pronouns since they are implied by the verb form.

Thank you so much for playing! If you have any questions, comments, or corrections, please let me know!