And somewhere inside that catastrophe, a language lost its moment.

This episode is about what happened next. About the writers who kept writing anyway, the movement that gathered around a pamphlet and a newspaper, and the specific people who reached into the accumulated inheritance of Croatian culture and arranged it into something that could be shared, printed, and passed on.

It is also, in the end, about what any of this has to do with the language you are trying to learn.

You can read the original essay here: https://open.substack.com/pub/talktimecroatian/p/your-saturday-letter-from-zagreb-578?r=7l683a&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

This week I’m thinking about a question the journalist Sanne Breimer asked in a recent interview: who gets to speak, and who is silenced? She was talking about Africa and Asia. I think she was also talking about us.

In this episode I trace a line from Bill Ashcroft’s The Empire Writes Back through Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities to Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah — and I ask what these thinkers have to say about a language that survived nine centuries of empire by staying alive in kitchens, in villages, and in the mouths of people who were never asked for their opinion.

The full written version, with all references and the photograph, is in Saturday’s letter: Who Gets to Tell the Story.

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This episode explores the quiet, often invisible exhaustion of code-switching — especially for those in the Croatian diaspora, moving between Croatian at home and English in daily life. We talk about what researchers have found about heritage Croatian across generations, why the language changes rather than simply disappears, and the small powerful moments that keep it alive.

For anyone who has ever wondered whether they are speaking Croatian enough. Whether it is too late. Whether the effort is worth it.

It is. And you are not doing it alone.

More about learning Croatian: talktimecro.com

I wrote about čežnja, about volim te, about the generation of Croatian parents who closed the door on the language out of love — and what their children are now trying to rebuild. And then I recorded a short episode about it. In English, for once, because this particular story needed to be told that way.

Have a listen. Then, if you want the full piece with the research and the references and the longer argument, it is linked below.

In this episode I walk through five specific reasons Croatian courses fail, backed by peer-reviewed research.

Want to go deeper? The full article with all references is linked below.