If you learn four Croatian words before coming to Split, make them dobar dan (good day), hvala (thank you), molim (please) and živjeli (cheers). Nobody expects you to speak Croatian — English is widely spoken and the city is used to visitors — but the difference between arriving with nothing and arriving with four words is genuinely visible in how you get treated. Below are twenty that earn their place, including several that no language app will teach you because they are Dalmatian rather than Croatian.
How to pronounce any of it
Croatian is spelled as it sounds, which makes it far easier than it looks. Five rules get you most of the way: c is “ts” (as in cats), č is “ch”, ć is a softer “ch”, š is “sh”, ž is the “s” in measure, and j is “y”. Every letter is pronounced and nothing is silent. Hvala is HVAH-la, not “vala”. Get those and you are more intelligible than most visitors.
The four that matter
Dobar dan — good day, the all-purpose greeting; dobro jutro before about ten, dobra večer in the evening. Bok is the casual “hi”, though it belongs more to Zagreb than here. Hvala — thank you; hvala lijepa for warmth. Molim — a word that works absurdly hard: please, you’re welcome, and “sorry, what?” all at once. Živjeli — cheers, literally “may we live”, and you are expected to make eye contact.
The words that change a menu
Domaće is the most useful word in this article: homemade, from here, the family’s own. Ask for domaće vino or domaće ulje and you will be poured something different from what is on the list. Konoba is the old tavern — see our konoba menu decoder for the rest. Dobar tek is “enjoy your meal”, said to the table. Račun is the bill, and it will not arrive until you ask for it, which is politeness, not neglect.
The Dalmatian ones
Here is where you stop sounding like an app. Pomalo — slowly, gently, easy does it — functions as a greeting, a goodbye, a piece of advice and an entire worldview. Fjaka is the blissful inability to do anything, explained properly in our guide to the art of doing nothing. Gušt is pleasure or relish — something done na gušt is done for the joy of it. And ča is simply “what”, the marker of the Chakavian dialect this coast speaks; say it and people will smile, because you have just signalled Dalmatia rather than Croatia.
The weather words
You will hear these daily and they explain the mood of the day. Bura is the cold, dry, violent wind off the mountains that leaves the sky unbelievably clear. Jugo is its warm, wet, grumpy opposite from the south-east, and it gets blamed for headaches and arguments. Maestral is the afternoon sea breeze that makes summer bearable. More is the sea — the single most-used noun in any Dalmatian conversation. Our guide to the winds tells you which one you woke up to.
The polite scaffolding
Oprostite — excuse me, and the right way to begin a question. Izvolite — “here you are / go ahead”, which you will hear constantly. Ne razumijem — I don’t understand. Govorite li engleski? — do you speak English, and asking it in Croatian is worth more than you would think. Lipo is the Dalmatian form of lijepo, beautiful, and it gets used about absolutely everything.
What not to worry about
Cases, genders and the seven ways a noun can end. You will get them wrong and it does not matter — nobody is grading you, and an obviously-trying foreigner is treated kindly here. What does matter is greeting people when you enter a shop, saying thank you, and not opening with English as though it were expected. Two seconds of Croatian first, then English, is the whole trick. Try it from our apartments at the bakery around the corner and you will see it work immediately.