About Hrvatske Novine

Hrvatske Novine

Hrvatske Novine is the Croatian-language weekly newspaper of the Burgenland Croats, the recognised Croatian minority of Austria's eastern province of Burgenland. It is published in Eisenstadt, the provincial capital — Željezno in Croatian — by the Croatian Press Association, and appears on Fridays with between sixteen and twenty-eight pages per issue. The Austria-Forum's encyclopaedia of Austria records that the newspaper has been published since 1910, which makes it one of the oldest minority newspapers in Austria and the senior secular paper of its community; the Croatian Cultural Association in Burgenland describes it as written mostly in Burgenland Croatian, with regular articles also in standard Croatian. Its reporting concentrates on the situation and problems of the Burgenland Croats, while regularly covering Austria's other ethnic groups and minority questions in other countries. Together with the church newspaper Crikveni Glasnik, founded in 1946, it forms the weekly print press of a minority whose ancestors settled the region in the sixteenth century.

The Burgenland Croats and their language

The community Hrvatske Novine serves descends from Croatian settlers who, fleeing the Ottoman advance, were brought in the early sixteenth century by nobles of western Hungary and Austria to repopulate lands in what is today Burgenland, together with adjoining parts of Lower Austria, that had been emptied by war and epidemics. The settlers came from regions ranging from the Dalmatian coast to Slavonia, and their origins remain visible in the variety of Burgenland Croatian dialects, folk costumes and songs. Burgenland Croatian is a distinct, standardised written variety that differs from the modern standard language of Croatia, and its speakers are traditionally divided into dialect groups such as the Čakavci and Štokavci. Census figures cited in the Austria-Forum show how the language's base has narrowed: in 1934 some 40,500 people, thirteen per cent of Burgenland's population, said they spoke Croatian in everyday life, while the 1991 census counted about 19,460 members of the ethnic group resident in Burgenland, with several thousand more Burgenland Croats living in Vienna. A weekly newspaper in the minority's own written language is, in that setting, both a news medium and an instrument of language maintenance.

A newspaper published since 1910

The Austria-Forum encyclopaedia states that Hrvatske Novine has been published since 1910. That date places its founding in the last decade of the Habsburg monarchy, when the Burgenland Croats still lived within the Kingdom of Hungary and before the province of Burgenland itself existed; the region only became Austrian in 1921, after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, and the Croatian population found itself divided between Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The paper thus predates the political order in which it now operates. Some care with the early record is appropriate: publicly available summary sources agree on the 1910 start and on the paper's continuity as the community's principal newspaper, but they do not document in detail its editors, interruptions or title changes across the monarchy's collapse, the authoritarian 1930s and the National Socialist period, and this profile does not invent those details. What is established is the paper's recognised place in the minority's press tradition: the Austria-Forum calls it, after the church paper Crikveni Glasnik of 1946, the most important Croatian paper of Burgenland, and it is named in Austria's tradition of press support for ethnic-group media.

Publisher: the Croatian Press Association

Hrvatske Novine is published by the Croatian Press Association, in Croatian the Hrvatsko štamparsko društvo. The association is more than a newspaper publisher: the Austria-Forum records that it releases numerous publications and publishes literature by Burgenland Croatian authors, as well as the calendar Gradišće, the community's annual almanac, taking its name from the Croatian name for Burgenland. A Croatian printing operation in Eisenstadt also produces the weekly alongside these other titles, and the Croatian minority's documentation structures in the province produce schoolbooks for Croatian bilingual schools. This embedding matters. The weekly does not stand alone as a commercial product; it is the flagship periodical of a small publishing ecosystem whose combined output — newspaper, calendar, books and school materials — sustains Burgenland Croatian as a written language. The paper's survival therefore depends on the same combination that sustains minority publishing across Austria: sales and subscriptions within a small community, the voluntary and institutional labour of the minority's associations, and public funding for ethnic-group media, whose production costs, as the Croatian Cultural Association notes, are relatively high precisely because print runs are small.

Format, language and content

The Croatian Cultural Association's account of Burgenland Croatian media gives the paper's concrete shape: Hrvatske Novine appears each Friday with sixteen to twenty-eight pages. It is written for the most part in the Burgenland Croatian language, while articles in standard Croatian also appear regularly — a combination that reflects its readership, whose home language is the Burgenland variety but whose cultural horizon includes the Republic of Croatia and its standard language. Its reporting concentrates on the situation and problems of the Burgenland Croats themselves: village life in the Croatian and mixed-language communities, bilingual schooling, the work of the cultural associations, church and municipal affairs, and the politics of minority rights in Vienna and Eisenstadt. It also regularly deals with other ethnic groups in Austria and with minority situations in other countries, placing its community's experience in a comparative frame. Alongside it, the Diocese of Eisenstadt's Crikveni Glasnik appears weekly with about eight pages as the Croatian church paper, and the cultural association's own Glasilo appears quarterly, so the Friday weekly is the community's principal source of regular secular news in its own language.

Minority rights and the paper's public role

The legal world in which Hrvatske Novine operates was created after 1945. Article 7 of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 guaranteed the rights of the Croatian minority, including the use of Croatian in education, the judiciary and public administration. The 1976 Ethnic Groups Act restricted that use in public life, until a constitutional complaint led to changes in 1987, after which Croatian became an official language in six of Burgenland's seven districts. Bilingual education has been provided in villages with a substantial minority population, and a Minorities Advisory Council has represented the Croats since 1993. The weekly's journalism follows this framework closely, because its readers encounter the state — schools, courts, offices, subsidies — through the minority-rights regime. The Federal Union of European Nationalities' profile of the Croatian Cultural Association likewise lists Hrvatske Novine among the ethnic group's weekly published media, alongside the church paper. In short, the paper functions as the community's gazette of its own public life: it records association meetings, school questions, church feasts and commemorations that no German-language provincial paper would cover in Croatian or in comparable detail.

Research value: a corpus of Burgenland Croatian

An unusual measure of the paper's importance comes from language technology. A recent research project on automatic text recognition for printed Burgenland Croatian trained its model on issues of Hrvatske Novine from 2010 to 2019, accessed through ANNO, the Austrian National Library's digital newspaper repository, and described the paper as the main regular publication of the Burgenland Croatian community. The project reported character error rates of around two and a half per cent and described its model as the first tailored to Burgenland Croatian, a low-resource language variety. For a weekly of a small minority, that choice of training corpus is telling: Hrvatske Novine is the most substantial continuous body of printed Burgenland Croatian prose available to researchers, and its digitised issues in the national library's archive preserve the community's written language year by year. The paper is therefore not only read by its subscribers; it has become primary evidence for linguists studying how a centuries-old diaspora language, under intense contact with German and Hungarian, is written, standardised and changed.

Challenges: assimilation and a small market

The pressures on Hrvatske Novine are candidly described in the minority's own institutional literature: the greatest challenge facing the Burgenland Croats today is strong assimilation. Croatian is official in six of seven districts, and bilingual schooling exists, but Croatian is often taught more as a foreign language in secondary schools than used as a living community language, and competence among younger generations is declining — a concern documented in Austrian reporting on the falling numbers of pupils speaking Croatian. For the weekly, assimilation translates directly into a shrinking natural readership, while its production economics remain those described by the Croatian Cultural Association: low print runs make unit costs relatively high, and publishers of ethnic-group media are permanently dependent on public subsidies. The paper has nonetheless maintained weekly publication on Fridays, in Burgenland Croatian, for a community whose total numbers are counted in the tens of thousands. Its longevity since 1910 — through the collapse of the monarchy, the creation of Burgenland, dictatorship and the post-war minority-rights settlement — reflects a community decision, renewed every generation, that a printed weekly in its own language is worth sustaining.

Hrvatske Novine today

Today Hrvatske Novine continues to appear in Eisenstadt on Fridays, published by the Croatian Press Association with sixteen to twenty-eight pages per issue, written mainly in Burgenland Croatian with regular contributions in standard Croatian. It remains, with the church weekly Crikveni Glasnik, one of the two weekly newspapers of the Burgenland Croats, and the principal secular one. Its subject matter is its community: the villages, schools, associations and parishes of Croatian Burgenland, the state of minority rights in Austria, and the affairs of other ethnic groups at home and abroad. More than a century after its first publication in 1910, the paper's continued existence is itself a fact of Austrian media history — a small-language weekly that outlived the empire in which it was founded and became, in the words of the research that now uses its pages as a linguistic corpus, the main regular publication of the Burgenland Croatian community.