Burgenland Croatian Burgenland Croatian Burgenland Croatian ("Gradišćanskohrvatski jezik"; German: "Burgenlandkroatische Sprache"; Hungarian: "Gradišćei horvát nyelv") is a regional variety of the Chakavian dialect of Croatian spoken in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. Burgenland Croatian is recognized as a minority language in the Austrian state of Burgenland, where it is spoken by 19,412 people according to official reports (2001). Many of the Burgenland Croatian speakers in Austria also live in Vienna and Graz, due to the process of urbanization, which is mostly driven by the poor economic situation of large parts of Burgenland. Smaller Croatian minorities in western Hungary, southwestern
Burgenland Croatian majority being the Chakavians. They originally came from the river Una valley. Burgenland Croats did not take part in the shaping of the present standard Croatian in the 19th century. Instead, they constructed their own written standard based mainly on the local Chakavian speech and adopted the Croatian alphabet, a modified Latin alphabet, as their script. It is still a matter of debate whether Burgenland Croatian should be classified as a Slavic micro-language of its own. Burgenland Croatian dialects are mostly viewed as isolated dialects of the Croatian. Burgenland Croatian and the Prekmurje dialect of Slovene (in Prekmurje and Hungary)