Croatian

Family: Indo-European · Eurasia · ISO hrv · Glottolog · 5,600,000 speakers
25
Consonants
11
Vowels

The phoneme inventory below shows every sound that functions as a meaningful unit in Croatian — a Indo-European language spoken in Eurasia . With 36 phonemes, it has an average-sized inventory compared to the world's languages. Sounds marked with a dashed border (*) are marginal: they appear only in loanwords or highly specialized contexts and are not part of the core phonological system.

Consonants

approximant

fricative

lateral fricative

sibilant fricative

trill

Vowels

* Marginal phoneme — occurs only in loanwords or rare contexts.

How large is this inventory?

Smaller (11) Average (36) Larger (141)
36
phonemes

Croatian has 36 phonemes, placing it in the 49th percentile of languages by inventory size — roughly average for a human language.

Compared to English

For English speakers learning Croatian, these are the sounds that will require the most focused practice.

In Croatian, not in English (19)

These sounds don't exist in English — English speakers will need to learn them from scratch.

In English, not in Croatian (28)

English speakers learning Croatian won't use these sounds — they'll need to suppress them.

Most phonologically similar languages

Ranked by Jaccard similarity — the proportion of phonemes shared relative to the combined inventory of both languages.

Compare Croatian with another language

See which sounds are shared and which are unique.