Ustaše Ethnolinguistic-Racical Ideology in ‘Croatian Purism’

Croatian is the common language of the Republic of Croatia, the national language representing the Croatian people, and the core national symbol. After independence in 1991, Croatia sets priorities to complete the identity of pure Croatian people, which is different from Serbian, and to recreate the Croatian language for this purpose. The core of Croatian language policy is generally described as ‘Croatian purism’. Croatian purism, led by only fighting spirit, is, in principle, to remove all elements that undermine Croatian purity. The ideology that extremely emphasized the purity of the Croatian people in Croatian history comes from Ustasia. The Croatian Independent State (Nezavista Država Hrvatska: NDH), which was a practical aspect of Ustasia, implements ‘language purism’ according to the principle of ‘blood and language’. The situation and development method of the two-lingual purism are very different, but in ‘Croatian purism’ unique to fighting spirit, some aspects of NDH's ‘blood and language’ ideology appear. This study studies NDH's linguistic purism based on Ustasia’s racial ideology and ‘Croatian purism’ based on the romantic nationalism of ‘one language = one territory’ from an ethnolingustic perspective.