Croatian is the official language of the Republic of Croatia and one of the three official languages of Bosnia-Hezegovina. It is a South Slavonic language spoken as a mother tongue by 4,6 million people, mainly of Croatian origin living in the Republic of Croatia, parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and by the Croats living abroad. The Croatian language comprises three main dialect groups. Of these, the stokavian group contains the greatest number of speakers. The group itself comprises three separate dialects, traditionally distinguished by their treatment of the Common Slavic vowel . The Ijekavian dialect, so called because Common Slavic emerged as "(i)je", is the basis for standard literary Croatian. Croatian orthography is largely phonemic, which means that each phoneme--or distinctive sound--is represented by a single letter and each letter, in turn, generally represents a single sound. This contrasts dramatically with the English version of the Roman alphabet, in which a single letter may represent several different sounds.

Standard Croatian does not employ the so-called "tonic accent" of other South Slavic dialects. Rather, Croatian employs simple word stress, which is somewhat "lighter" than the relatively "heavy" stress of English, German or Russian. In two-syllable words, stress generally falls on the first syllable; in words of three or more syllables, stress may fall on any syllable except the last.

Croatian alphabet

The Croatian language employs the Latin (or Roman) alphabet. All 30 letters are listed in this picture. As you can see, several of the Croatian letters are not "international". They contain diacritical symbols typical for Slavic languages such as Czech or Slovakian.

There are seven nominal cases in Croatian. Three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural) are also distinguished. Case, grammatical gender, and number are represented by a single marker suffixed to the noun. Adjectives agree with their noun in grammatical gender, number, and case; however, main verbs and participles agree with the subject only in person and number, and grammatical gender and number.

Word order in the sentence is subject-verb-object, although object-pronoun particles can precede the verb. There are six types of particles that must appear in a strict order; a complicated set of rules governs where the particles appear.

source:http://www.hr/hrvatska/language/izgovor.en.htm

Orthography, accent, sounds
(English)
This private website gives a brief introduction into the pronunciation of the Croatian language regarding its orthography, accent (stress) and sounds.