Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: Is Croatian slavic?
It is considered that the Czech-Polish Croatian tribes were related to the Croatian tribes from Zakarpattia and Prykarpattia in Ukraine. They became separated during the migration period and seemingly formed one large Proto-Slavic tribe. It is theorized that the migration of those (White) Croatian tribes in the 7th century was the second and final Slavic migratory wave to the Balkans, which is related to the thesis by Bogo Grafenauer about the double migration of Slavs. According to this thesis, although it is possible that some Croatian tribes were present among Slavs in the first Slavic-Avar wave in the 6th century, it is argued that the Croatian migration in the second wave probably was not equally numerous to make a significant common-linguistical influence, while others considered they arrived in a significantly larger number. Zdenko Vinski and argued that the double migration thesis is supported by the rare findings of objects and ceramics of Prague-Korchak culture on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia which were dated to the end of 6th and beginning of the 7th century (indicating first wave Slavs), and did not make a continuity with Slavic archaeological findings from the 8th-9th century, indicating assimilation. The Croatian tribes are also seen as a warrior group who assimilated into already present Slavs. In the territory of present-day Croatia they also gradually assimilated with the Pre-Slavic population because archaeology indicates a significant continuity of late antiquity population which have partially withdrawn to the mountains, coastal cities and islands.
Chakavian in its actual use is the least spoken Serbo-Croatian dialect, being spoken only by 12% Croats. It is now mostly reduced in southwestern Croatia along the eastern Adriatic: Adriatic islands, and sporadically in the mainland coast, with rare inland enclaves up to central Croatia, and minor enclaves in Austria and Montenegro. All areas of old contacts with Romance languages.
Milošević rejected the independence of Croatia in 1991, and even after the formation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), it too did not initially recognize Croatia's independence. Plans by Milošević to carve out territory from Croatia to the local Serbs had begun by June 1990, according to the diary of Serbian official Borisav Jović. The Serbian government along with a clique of pro-Milošević members of the Yugoslav army and its general staff, secretly adopted the RAM or "frame" plan that involved the partition of Croatia and Bosnia to give large amounts of territory to the local Serbs that would remain united with Serbia, effectively a Greater Serbia. Armaments and military equipment were placed in strategic positions throughout Croatia and Bosnia for use by the Serbs, and local Serbs were trained as police and paramilitary soldiers in preparation for war.
Slavs can be further grouped by religion. Orthodox Christianity is practiced by the majority of Slavs. The Orthodox Slavs include the Belarusians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Russians, Serbs, and Ukrainians and are defined by Orthodox customs and Cyrillic script as well as their cultural connection to the Byzantine Empire (Serbs also use Latin script on equal terms). Their second most common religion is Roman Catholicism. The Catholic Slavs include Croats, Czechs, Kashubs, Moravians, Poles, Silesians, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Sorbs and are defined by their Latinate influence and heritage and connection to Western Europe. There are also substantial Protestant and Lutheran minorities especially amongst the West Slavs, such as the historical Bohemian (Czech) Hussites.
Slavs are the largest ethno-linguistic group in Europe. Present-day Slavic people are classified into East Slavs (chiefly Belarusians, Russians, Rusyns, and Ukrainians), West Slavs (chiefly Czechs, Kashubs, Moravians, Poles, Silesians, Slovaks and Sorbs), and South Slavs (chiefly Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Gorani, Pomaks, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes).
Beginning on 16 September 2015, migrants and refugees from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa began entering Croatia from Serbia in large numbers after the construction of the Hungary-Serbia barrier. On 17 September Croatia closed its border with Serbia. After initial efforts to register all migrant entrances into Croatia, registration ceased on 18 September and migrants began to be transported toward Slovenia and Hungary. By 23 September 2015 over 40.000 had entered Croatia from Serbia, with main acceptance centers set up in Opatovac and Zagreb, while migrants were also held in Beli Manastir, Ilača, Tovarnik, Ježevo and Sisak. Milanović criticized Serbia for sending migrants only towards the Croatian border, while sparing Hungary and Romania and stated that his country "will not become a migrant hotspot". Tensions escalated between Serbia and Croatia and on 24 September Serbia banned imports from Croatia, while Croatia responded by banning all Serbian-registered vehicles from entering the country. On 25 September Croatia lifted the blockade on its border and Serbia lifted its ban on imports from Croatia, but Milanović said that he is ready to block the border again if necessary. With winter approaching a new, more permanent refugee acceptance center was built in Slavonski Brod in late 2015.
East Herzegovina (, Источна Херцеговина) is the eastern part of the historical Herzegovina region in Bosnia and Herzegovina, east of the Neretva river, part of the Republika Srpska entity. Major towns are Trebinje, Nevesinje, Foča and Bileća, predominantly inhabited by ethnic Serbs (see Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina). West Herzegovina is the western part, west of the Neretva river, and is today administratively part of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton and West Herzegovina Canton, predominantly inhabited by ethnic Croats, located in the Federation of B&H entity. The easternmost parts of historical Herzegovina (the Duchy of St. Sava and Sanjak of Herzegovina) lie in Montenegro, in so-called "Old Herzegovina", which became part of the Principality of Montenegro in 1878. In 1991, local ethnic Serbs of the region declared the territory of SAO East Herzegovina independent and joined other Serb territories into Republika Srpska by 1992. The meso-region has since been named Trebinje Region (Regija Trebinje/).
Montenegro is multiethnic state in which no ethnic group forms a majority. Major ethnic groups include Montenegrins (Црногорци/"Crnogorci") and Serbs (Срби/"Srbi"), others are Bosniaks ("Bošnjaci"), Albanians ("Albanci – Shqiptarët") and Croats ("Hrvati"). The number of "Montenegrins" and "Serbs" fluctuates widely from census to census due to changes in how people perceive, experience, or choose to express, their identity and ethnic affiliation.
Ethnic composition according to the 2011 official data:
The evolution of the Croatia–Serbia border began in 1699 with the Treaty of Karlowitz, transferring Slavonia and a portion of Syrmia from the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburg Monarchy at the conclusion of the Great Turkish War. The rest of Syrmia was transferred to the Habsburg Monarchy through the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718. The transferred territories were organised within the monarchy into the Kingdom of Slavonia, with its eastern border established at the Danube, and the defensive belt of Military Frontier stretching along the Sava River, governed directly from Vienna.
The Illyrian movement was a 19th-century pan-South Slavic political and cultural movement in Croatia that had the goal to standardize the regionally differentiated and orthographically inconsistent literary languages in Croatia, and finally merge them into a common South Slavic literary language. Specifically, three major groups of dialects were spoken on Croatian territory, and there had been several literary languages over four centuries. The leader of the Illyrian movement Ljudevit Gaj standardized the Latin alphabet in 1830–1850 and worked to bring about a standardized orthography. Although based in Kajkavian-speaking Zagreb, Gaj supported using the more populous Neo-Shtokavian – a version of Shtokavian that eventually became the predominant dialectal basis of both Croatian and Serbian literary language from the 19th century on. Supported by various South Slavic proponents, Neo-Shtokavian was adopted after an Austrian initiative at the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850, laying the foundation for the unified Serbo-Croatian literary language. The uniform Neo-Shtokavian then became common in the Croatian elite.
During 2015 and 2016, relations between Croatia and Serbia were further affected by to the ongoing migrant crisis, when Croatia decided to close its border with Serbia. In September 2015, Croatia barred all cargo traffic from Serbia, due to the migrant influx coming from Serbia in a move which further eroded the fragile relations between the two countries. 
In response to these actions, Vučić announced that counter measures will be enacted if an agreement with Croatia is not reached. 
The dispute was eventually resolved through the mediation of the EU Commission, yet the relations between the two neighboring countries remain fragile. 
On March 31, 2016, Vojislav Seselj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party, was acquitted of War Crime charges in the Hague Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. The verdict has caused controversy in Croatia. Vučić distanced himself from Šešelj and his policy, but stated that the verdict should not be used as a tool for political pressure on Serbia.
Bulgarian is the only language with official status and native for % of the population. It belongs to the Slavic group of languages, but it has a number of grammatical peculiarities, shared with its closest relative Macedonian, that set it apart from other Slavic languages: these include a complex verbal morphology (which also codes for distinctions in evidentiality), the absence of noun cases and infinitives, and the use of a suffixed definite article. Other major languages are Turkish and Romani, which according to the 2011 census were spoken natively by 9.1% and 4.2% respectively.
Croatian dance traditionally refers to a series of folk-dances, the most common being the kolo ("circle [dance]"). Croatian dance varies by region, and can be found throughout the various regions of Austria, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia, Kosovo, Hungary, and Romania. The traditional kolo is a circle dance, where dancers follow each other around the circle, is relatively simple in form and widespread throughout other Slavic countries. Due to emigration, Croatian folk dance groups are prevalent throughout the diaspora, most notably the United States, Canada, Australia, and Germany.
On 20 November 1991 Lord Carrington asked: "Can the internal boundaries between Croatia and Serbia and between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia be regarded as frontiers in terms of public international law?" Applying the principle of "uti possidetis juris", the commission concluded on 11 January 1992, "The boundaries between Croatia and Serbia, between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, and possibly other adjacent independent states may not be altered except by agreement freely arrived at... Except where otherwise agreed, the former boundaries become frontiers protected by international law".
Czech, the official language of the Czech Republic (a member of the European Union since 2004), is one of the EU's official languages and the 2012 Eurobarometer survey found that Czech was the foreign language most often used in Slovakia. Economist Jonathan van Parys collected data on language knowledge in Europe for the 2012 European Day of Languages. The five countries with the greatest use of Czech were the Czech Republic (98.77 percent), Slovakia (24.86 percent), Portugal (1.93 percent), Poland (0.98 percent) and Germany (0.47 percent).
Slavs are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group who speak the various Slavic languages of the larger Balto-Slavic linguistic group. They are native to Eurasia, stretching from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe all the way north and eastwards to Northeast Europe, Northern Asia (Siberia), the Caucasus, and Central Asia (especially Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) as well as historically in Western Europe (particularly in East Germany) and Western Asia (including Anatolia). From the early 6th century they spread to inhabit the majority of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Today, there is a large Slavic diaspora throughout North America, particularly in the United States and Canada as a result of immigration.
The dialects of Macedonian comprise the Slavic dialects spoken in the Republic of Macedonia as well as some varieties spoken in the wider geographic region of Macedonia. They are part of the dialect continuum of South Slavic languages that joins the Macedonian language with Bulgarian to the east and Serbo-Croatian to the north. The precise delimitation between these languages is fleeting and controversial.
In the first half of the 10th century, the Cyrillic script was devised in the Preslav Literary School, Bulgaria, based on the Glagolitic, the Greek and Latin alphabets. Modern versions of the alphabet are now used to write five more Slavic languages such as Belarusian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian as well as Mongolian and some other 60 languages spoken in the former Soviet Union. Medieval Bulgaria was the most important cultural centre of the Slavic peoples at the end of the 9th and throughout the 10th century. The two literary schools of Preslav and Ohrid developed a rich literary and cultural activity with authors of the rank of Constantine of Preslav, John Exarch, Chernorizets Hrabar, Clement and Naum of Ohrid. Bulgaria exerted similar influence on her neighbouring countries in the mid- to late 14th century, at the time of the Tarnovo Literary School, with the work of Patriarch Evtimiy, Gregory Tsamblak, Constantine of Kostenets (Konstantin Kostenechki). Bulgarian cultural influence was especially strong in Wallachia and Moldova where the Cyrillic script was used until 1860, while Church Slavonic was the official language of the princely chancellery and of the church until the end of the 17th century.
Slovakia (; ), officially the Slovak Republic (, ), is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, and the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's territory spans about and is mostly mountainous. The population is over 5.4 million and consists mostly of Slovaks. The capital and largest city is Bratislava, and the second largest city is Košice. The official language is Slovak.
Herzegovina ( or ; Serbo-Croatian: "Hercegovina", Херцеговина, ) is the southern region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. While there is no official border distinguishing it from the Bosnian geographical region, it is sometimes asserted that the borders of the region are Dalmatia to the southwest, Montenegro to the east, Mount Maglić to the northeast, and Mount Ivan to the north. Measurements of the area range from , or around 22% of the total area of the present-day country, to , around 24% of the country.
Bulgarian is the country's only official language. It's spoken by the vast majority of the Bulgarian population and used at all levels of society. It is a Slavic language, and its closest relative is Macedonian.
Croatian literature across the centuries is argued to demonstrate a tendency to cherish Slavic words and word coinage, and to expel "foreign" borrowings. Croatian philologist Zlatko Vince articulates this tendency as follows:
Croatian literature even in the old ages tends to stay away from barbarisms and foreign words, a certain conscious care in the works of literature is felt when it comes to language selection. In the course of centuries hence the tendency is formed for literary language to be as much as pure and selective as possible. One thing is the colloquial language, often ridden with foreign words, and entirely different thing is the language of literary works in which tendency for language purity arises. The way and the extent to which that need could be satisfied is different in various periods, but the tendency for as pure and selective language can be noted even in Old Dubrovnik writers, and in Vitezović. All the way to pre-Illyrian and Illyrian efforts and by the end of the XIX. century, when the osmotic influence of traditional Croatian literary heritage does not cease to stop...That care of language purity which characterizes Croatian literary expression even in the XIX. century, remains immanent in later periods...Literary language of the Croats is in fact organic continuation of older state of affairs in Croatian literature.
In a session regarding the issue of the usage for foreign words in Croatian language, as well on the problems of ongoing projects of coining Slavic replacements for established technical terms by combined efforts of linguists and specialists, the now defunct institution for the standardization of Croatian language—the Council for Standard Croatian Language Norm—has presented the historical overview of the issue as follows:
The attitude towards foreign words in Croatian literary language is multi-dimensional in many respects. The origin of Croatian language culture, when writing in Slavic, is determined by the tradition of Church Slavonic literature. Originating from copies of Ancient Greek liturgical texts, it places a distinct emphasis to Slavic expressive devices, and only exceptionally non-Slavic words are being borrowed. That tendency has been continued in Croatian language culture to this day. The usage of Croatian words, if necessary even in a modified meaning, or Croatian coinages, if they're considered to be successful, represents higher merit then mere mechanical borrowing of foreign expressive devices. That way the Croatian word is more solemn and formal ("glazba", "mirovina", "redarstvenik"), and the loanword is more relaxing and less demanding ("muzika", "penzija", "policajac"). This dimension of purism is incorporated into the very foundations of Croatian language sensitivity.
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" from 1842 and Bogoslav Šulek's "German-Croatian-Italian dictionary of scientific terminology", 1875. These works, particularly 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).
In 1585, a traveler and writer Marco A. Pigaffetta, in his "Itinerario" published in London, states: "In Constantinople it is customary to speak Croatian, a language which is understood by almost all official Turks, especially military men." Crucially though, the lingua franca at the time among Slavic elites in the Ottoman Empire was still Old Church Slavonic. For Italians traveling through to Istanbul, the language of the Slavic Croats was often the only exposure they had to any of the Slavic languages; indeed, Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects were far more common in Istanbul than Croatian.
The Slavic, also known as Pan-Slavic and Autochthonous-Slavic theory, dates back to the Croatian Renaissance, when was supported by Vinko Pribojević and Juraj Šižgorić. There's no doubt that Croatian language belongs to the Slavic languages, but they considered that Slavs were autochthonous in Illyricum and their ancestors were old Illyrians. It developed among the Dalmatian humanists, and was also considered by early modern writers, like Matija Petar Katančić, Mavro Orbini and Pavao Ritter Vitezović. This cultural and romanticist idea was especially promoted by the national Illyrian Movement and their leader Ljudevit Gaj in the 19th century.
East:
The Serbo-Croatian varieties have strong structural unity, and are regarded by most linguists as constituting one language. Today, language secessionism has led to several standards: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, although the latter has historically and traditionally been called Serbian and is still undergoing standardization. Bosnian was officially established in 1996. These Serbo-Croatian standards are all based on the Shtokavian dialect group. Other dialect groups, which have lower intelligibility with Shtokavian, are Chakavian in Dalmatia and Kajkavian in Croatia proper. The dominance of Shtokavian in the Western Balkans is due to historical westward migration during the Ottoman period. Slovene is grouped into South Slavic, but has many features shared with West Slavic languages. The Prekmurje Slovene and Kajkavian are especially close, and there is no clear delineation between them. In southeastern Serbia, dialects enter a transitional zone with Bulgarian and Macedonian, with features of both groups, and is commonly called Torlakian.