About 5 million people speak Croatian natively, mainly in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it is recognized as one of the official languages.
An estimated 5.5 to 6 million people speak Croatian in expatriate communities in the United States and across Europe.
Croatian is a Serbian-Croatian idiom that is part of the Slavic languages. It is mutually intelligible with Serbian and Bosnian, with which it has a common grammatical system.
The correct pronunciation