Хорватия тіліндегі сөзжасамның ерекшеліктері және серб тілінен айырмашылықтары

One of the defining features of modern Croatian is according to some a preference for word coinage from native Slavic morphemes, as opposed to adopting loanwords or replacing them altogether. This particularly relates to other Serbo Croatian standards of Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian which liberally draw on Turkish, Latin, Greek, Russian and English loanwords.

The Illyrian movement and its successor, the Zagreb Philological School, have been particularly successful in creating the corpus of Croatian terminology that covered virtually all areas of modern civilization. This was especially visible in two fundamental works: Ivan Mažuranić's and Josip Užarević's German Croatian dictionary (1842), and Bogoslav Šulek's German Croatian Italian dictionary of scientific terminology (1875). These works and especially Šulek's, systematized (i. e. collected from older dictionaries), invented and coined Croatian terminology for the 19th century jurisprudence, military schools, exact and social sciences, as well as numerous other fields (technology and commodities of urban civilization). During this period, purist attitudes towards loanwords were not identical between the two variants of Serbo Croatian. In Croatia, particularly during Croatian national revival, it was considered that purism " is a stronger assertion of identity than the mere wholesale adaptation of foreign terms" in opposition of neighbouring languages, German, Italian and Hungarian which "objectively dominated" a language that was, according to contemporary references, felt "subjectively inferior". A smaller part of German loanwords became part of the Croatian standard language, while a greater number of German loanwords remained in spoken dialects. The very lively purist activity in Croatia was not met with approval among Serbian philologists. Although the latter called for attention to the purity of the language in schools and scientific usage, they also warned about taking this policy too far. Linguistic objections against neologisms and calques "forged in Zagreb" were that they did not follow the rules of Shtokavian word formation but were modeled mainly on German compounds (veleposjednik, veleizdaja) or that some of the adopted Slavonic words (nužda, uštrb) or 'unnecessary Russianisms' do not conform to the Shtokavian phonological rules. Small number of neologisms have been accepted in Serbia, despite a persistent line of public support for substitution of loanwords with native words. In support of replacing loanwords were Jovan Bošković in his book O srpskom jeziku (1887), Jovan Živanović under the same title (1888), various articles and periodicals, and a leading Serbian linguist Aleksandar Belić, who thought that loanwords should only be used in exceptional cases. 'Antipurist campaigns' were, however, led by language advice columns in an influential Belgrade daily newspaper Politika, arguing that "loanwords are almost never either synonymous or equally applicable as the suggested native replacements."

During the Yugoslav period, from 1918 to 1990, Croatian and Serbian were treated as Western and Eastern variants of Serbo Croatian. Parts of this policy were systematic attempts to eliminate traits of standard Croatian by which it distinguished itself from standard Serbian, and vice versa.

In the Independent State of Croatia, a World War II state that existed between 1941 and 1945, the totalitarian dictatorship of Ante Pavelić pushed purist tendencies to extremes. The language law of 1941 promulgated purity as a policy, and tried to eliminate internationalisms, stigmatized Serbisms and introduced etymological spelling (korijenski pravopis). This era is best covered in Marko Samardžija's 1993 book Hrvatski jezik u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj ("Croatian language in the Independent State of Croatia").

In Communist Yugoslavia, Serbian terminology prevailed in a few areas: the military, diplomacy, Federal Yugoslav institutions (various institutes and research centres), state media and jurisprudence at Yugoslav level. The methods used for this "unification" were manifold and chronologically multifarious; even in the eighties, a common "argument" was to claim that the opponents of the official Yugoslav language policy were sympathising with the Ustaša regime of World War 2, and that the incriminated words were thus "ustašoid" as well. Concordantly, the possibility of using the previously frequent word časnik was already reduced to the extent that before 1991 it could occur only in special contexts, e. g. in relation to historical events. As a consequence, formerly suppressed words switched from the more or less passive vocabulary of standard Croatian to the active one without any special stylistic marking. The leaders of (mainstream) language purification were Stjepan Babić and Dalibor Brozović. Since the 1990s, a form of language censorship has been practiced by the "proofreaders" (called lektori) in the media and schoolbooks. Despite forcing techniques for implementing purism, there has been significant resistance to purism in common usage. There have also been Croatian linguists that offer severe criticism of the language purism, e. g., Vladimir Anić, Snježana Kordić, Dubravko Škiljan, and Mate Kapović.