Few words about Croatian literature.
The most ancient records were carved in stone during the Greek colonization of the Dalmatian islands in the fourth century B.C. With the arrival of the Romans the Latin language became the predominant language in public official communication and in the private sphere, and thus became the universal form of written communication.
During their history, the Croats were using three different languages, i.e. Latin (up to the first half of the nineteenth century), Old Slavic (from the ninth to the twentieth century) or the Croatian and Slavic type used in the church liturgy (from the twelfth to the sixteenth century) and the Croatian literary language (at first, the chakavian dialect) as written on the Plate from Baska in 1100. They were also using three alphabets, i.e. Latin, the Croatian Latin derived from the Glagolitic and the Cyrillic one (the Croatian variant). The first centers of Croatian literacy were situated along the coast.
When the diocese of Zagreb was founded in 1094, new centers were spreading rapidly in the hinterland. In the thirteenth century, the centre of literacy in medieval Slavonia was the church in Cazma. The Croats were among the first in Europe to have their own printed book, the so-called Glagolitic missal from 1483.