The political leadership of Croats in Serbia on Monday condemned the denial of the Croatian language in grammar books for eighth-graders in the country, noting that examples like this one show why negative sentiments among young people in Serbia about Croats should not be surprising.

The Croatian language in Serbia does not exist, Democratic Alliance of Vojvodina Croats (DSHV) head Tomislav Zigmanov said, adding that “this is just the tip of the iceberg of the social context affecting the status of Croats in Serbia.”

According to the local Croat-language weekly “Hrvatska rijec”, a grammar book for eighth- graders by a group of authors says that the Serbian, Slovenian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian languages are South Slavic languages while “Croats, Bosniaks and some Montenegrins call the Serbian language Croatian, Bosnian, Bosniak, or Montenegrin.”

The textbook was approved by the Serbian Institute for the Promotion of Education, the weekly says, noting that it had contacted the competent institutions in that regard.

“As regards language as a linguistic and political category, our position is that it is up to the authors of the textbook to provide an explanation. The matter is covered sufficiently in textbooks and and there are also experts on the Serbian language at the Institute who check textbooks,” the Committee for the Standardisation of the Serbian Language said in its reply to the weekly, among other things.

“The Serbian education system denies our language. We should therefore not be surprised by the views of children who are taught from such books,” the DSHV said in a Twitter post, with Zigmanov citing as an example of the negativity associated with Croats the declaration of the Bunjevci ikavian dialect as an official, non-Croatian language in Subotica in May this year.

The Subotica Town Council earlier this year amended the town statute to declare the Bunjevci dialect one of the four official languages in that town, along with Serbian, Croatian and Hungarian. The demand for declaring its speech an official language in Subotica was made by the Bunjevci community, which denies its belonging to the Croatian people.

“It is a paradox that Croatian, an official EU language, is being denied in Serbia and that the status of an official language is awarded to the so-called Bunjevci language, which is not recognised anywhere else in the world and cannot be recognised in the full sense of that word,” Zigmanov said.