Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic on Wednesday asked Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic to address the issue of Serbian grammar books that negate the existence of the Croatian language, and this demand was presented during their brief meeting in Slovenia.

After their talks on the margins of the EU-Western Balkans summit meeting in the Slovenian mountain resort of Brdo pri Kranju, Plenkovic told the press that he had demanded that Vucic solve the issue of the textbooks that practically denied the Croatian language.

Plenkovic explained that he had underscored that the issue must be corrected, while Vucic responded that “he would see what he could do”.

On Tuesday, Plenkovic said that Serbian textbooks’ denial of the Croatian language was outrageous and unacceptable.

“The embassy, the foreign ministry and all the relevant institutions have a clear duty to send protest notes to Serbia,” Plenkovic told the press after he met junior partners in the ruling coalition in Zagreb.

According to the local Croat-language weekly “Hrvatska rijec” in Vojvodina, 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.

During today’s meeting, the two officials also discussed the matter of persons who had gone missing during the 1991-95 war in Croatia.

“We have provided Belgrade with some data (about the disappeared Croatia is searching for), and we expect Serbia to give some information accordingly, so as to see whether anything of that can be considered reliable,” Plenkovic said.