was sentenced to 50 days in jail in 1987. Concordantly, the possibility of using the previously frequent word časnik was already reduced to the extent that before 1991 it could occur only in special contexts, e.g. in relation to historical events. After Communism After the collapse of Communism and subsequent wars, the situation changed. Suppressive relations changed significantly after the dissolution of the SFRJ and the founding of the sovereign Republic of Croatia. The regained freedom enabled public usage of previously forbidden words in the semantic sphere of administration, army etc. As a consequence, formerly suppressed words switched from the more or less passive vocabulary of standard Croatian to the active one without any special stylistic marking. Croatian linguists fought this wave of "populist purism", led by various patriotic non-linguists. 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). In 1993, the Dr. Ivan Šreter Award was created to promote creation of neologisms in Croatian. Before 1994, the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (which had come into power in 1990) considered ideas reminiscent of the Independent State of Croatia language policy in the form of the so-called "korijenski pravopis", but ultimately discarded it as too radical and instead made the "londonski pravopis", originally made during the Croatian Spring, official. At the time, extreme forms of purism were advocated by nationalist-minded linguists who were in turn described by Radoslav Katičić as "marginal elements". The leaders of (mainstream) language purification were Stjepan Babić and Dalibor Brozović. Since the 1990s, a form of language censorship has been practiced by the "proofreaders" (called lektori) in the media and schoolbooks. Despite forcing techniques for implementing purism, there has been significant resistance to purism in common usage. There have also been Croatian linguists that offer severe criticism of the language purism, e.g., Vladimir Anić, Snježana Kordić, Dubravko Škiljan, Kristina Štrkalj and Mate Kapović. Notes References Milan Moguš: A History of Croatian Literary Language, 1996 Further reading External links Lexical changes in contemporary Croatian Croatian language Linguistic purism