A presentation was also held of about 300 new Croatian literary and philological editions from 34 publishers.
Croatian is taught at state universities in Iowa and Indiana, under the auspices of the Croatian Science and Education Ministry, while at several other universities it is taught alongside Serbian and Bosnian, but still under the name Serbo-Croatian.
Professor Lidija Cvikic from Indiana said that Croatian in the United States is not learned only by Slavists as in Europe, but also by students of political sciences, economy, sociology and psychology. She said study groups are small and heterogeneous, and their exposure to the language is mainly in the written form on the Internet.
Professor Vinko Grubisic from Waterloo University in Canada, where the first Croatian language department was established on the American continent in the 1980s, presented an Internet programme for the study of Croatian at his university.
The Washington convention also saw the presentation of an English language catalogue including 286 Croatian titles published in 2005-06, with an emphasis on dictionaries, grammar books, textbooks and science papers.
Croatian is learned in the US for one or two semesters and is usually never spoken, Anita Sikic, one of the catalogue's authors, told Hina.
On Friday, Scholar Ante Stamac gave a talk on current trends in Croatian philology at the Croatian Embassy in Washington, while professor Reneo Lukic from Laval University in Quebec presented his book on Croatia's foreign policy since the country gained independence.