One of the defining features of modern Croatian is according to some a preference for word coinage from native Slavic morphemes, as opposed to adopting loanwords or replacing them altogether.
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.
[2] 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.
These works and especially 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).
'Antipurist campaigns' were, however, led by language advice columns in an influential Belgrade daily newspaper Politika, arguing that "loanwords are almost never either synonymous or equally applicable as the suggested native replacements.
[7] This era is best covered in Marko Samardžija's 1993 book Hrvatski jezik u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj ("Croatian language in the Independent State of Croatia").
[citation needed] The methods used for this "unification" were manifold and chronologically multifarious; even in the eighties, a common "argument" was to claim that the opponents of the official Yugoslav language policy were sympathising with the Ustaša regime of World War 2, and that the incriminated words were thus "ustašoid" as well.
For the usage of word časnik ('officer'), coined by a father of Croatian scientific terminology Bogoslav Šulek, the physician Ivan Šreter was sentenced to 50 days in jail in 1987.
Suppression changed significantly with the rise of ethnic nationalism and the independence of Croatia, which enabled public usage of previously forbidden words in the semantic sphere of administration, army etc.
Ironically: the same people who were, for decades, stigmatised as ultra-Croatian "linguistic nationalists" (Stjepan Babić, Dalibor Brozović, Radoslav Katičić, Miro Kačić) have been accused as pro-Serbian "political linguists" simply because they opposed these "language purges" that wanted to purge numerous words of Church Slavonic origin (which are common not only to Croatian and Serbian, but are also present in Polish, Russian, Czech and other Slavic languages).
[15][16][17] There have also been Croatian linguists that offer severe criticism of the language purism, e.g., Vladimir Anić,[18] Snježana Kordić,[19] Dubravko Škiljan,[13] Kristina Štrkalj[20] and Mate Kapović.