Language, education and art – the focus of this article is on a certain language and linguistic development in the second half of the 19th century in Croatia. This period of emergence and progress of the national movement of the Illyrians brought the emancipation of the modern Croatian language and society. Croatian ideologists, educated in German in Vienna and Budapest, began to use new formed words and phrases experimentally in newspapers and magazines. These media gave them the possibility to solve language uncertainties and to get rid of the baroque plurality of expressions, bringing their ideas to a broader public. Thus an applied language policy without institutionalised linguists took shape. The Illyrian very consistent work on Croatian word formation became the main model for the modern Croatian language. In contrast to the well-documented results printed in dictionaries, the intermediate stages of this work, as we can find them in newspapers and magazines, have been rare subject of discussion until now. Due to this reason the material analysed in this article is an essential addition to the already published works dealing with the modern Croatian language development.