HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE CROATIAN LANGUAGE AND ITS RELATION TO THE LANGUAGES OF THE BALKAN LINGUISTIC AREA.

In addition to a brief overview of the historical development of the Croatian language in the linguistic and sociolinguistic sense (as a literary and standard language), the paper attempts to examine its relationship to the languages of the Balkan linguistic area. Marginal presence of Balkan language features in Croatian is indicated, since Croatian territory is also geographically on the edge of the Balkans. But, since there has not been systematic research on this subject yet, the paper is merely an attempt to draw attention to some phenomena that might be interesting and to encourage further research and discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]