In the midth century, the first attempts to provide a Croatian literary standard began on the basis of the Neo-Shtokavian dialect that served as a supraregional lingua franca โ pushing back regional Chakavian , Kajkavian , and Shtokavian vernaculars. Besides the Shtokavian dialect, on which Standard Croatian is based, there are two other main supradialects spoken on the territory of Croatia, Chakavian and Kajkavian.
These supradialects, and the four national standards, are usually subsumed under the term "Serbo-Croatian" in English; this term is controversial for native speakers, [ 18 ] and names such as "Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian" BCMS are used by linguists and philologists in the 21st century. In the late medieval period up to the 17th century, the majority of semi-autonomous Croatia was ruled by two domestic dynasties of princes banovi , the Zrinski and the Frankopan , which were linked by inter-marriage.
The most standardised form KajkavianโIkavian became the cultivated language of administration and intellectuals from the Istrian peninsula along the Croatian coast, across central Croatia up into the northern valleys of the Drava and the Mura. The Illyrian movement was a 19th-century pan- South Slavic political and cultural movement in Croatia that had the goal to standardise the regionally differentiated and orthographically inconsistent literary languages in Croatia, and finally merge them into a common South Slavic literary language.
Specifically, three major groups of dialects were spoken on Croatian territory, and there had been several literary languages over four centuries. The leader of the Illyrian movement Ljudevit Gaj standardized the Latin alphabet in โ and worked to bring about a standardized orthography.
Although based in Kajkavian-speaking Zagreb , Gaj supported using the more populous Neo-Shtokavian โ a version of Shtokavian that eventually became the predominant dialectal basis of both Croatian and Serbian literary language from the 19th century on. The uniform Neo-Shtokavian then became common in the Croatian elite. In the s, the Zagreb Philological School dominated the Croatian cultural life, drawing upon linguistic and ideological conceptions advocated by the members of the Illyrian movement.
