This is what we Romanians call “pancakes” (clătite). In the US for example, these are not “pancakes”. What Americans call “pancakes”, we call “clătite americane” (American pancakes) or just “pancakes” (the untranslated English word).
~The pancakes in the photos were made by me~
In Croatian: palačinka (accentuated: palačínka, IPA: /palat͡ʃǐːŋka/, plural: palačínke). The origin is: Greek πλακοῦς (LS: “flat cake”), πλακόεντα > Latin placenta (OLD: “A kind of flat cake”) > Romanian plăcintă > Hungarian palacsinta > Austrian German Palatschinke > Croatian palačinka. As Croatia has spent much of its history as a part of Austria-Hungary, its culture has left a strong mark especially on the northern dialects and the culinary practices there.
Sources:
R. Matasović, Etimološki rječnik hrvatskoga jezika
PGW Glare, Oxford Latin Dictionary
Walde-Hofmann: Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
Liddel-Scott: Greek-English Lexicon
However, Croatian pancakes are very thin and bigger in surface than American ones. They’re made of batter, we usually fill them with jam and roll them up and eat like that (some other fillings are in use too, ofc). My sister sometimes buys herself some American pancakes, way thicker and covered in chocolate cream, and the rest of the family is always mildly horrified by them, lol. It’s pretty much two different dishes IMO. Palačinke would probably better correspond to crêpes, but we don’t have different words to distinguish American pancakes from crêpes…
I’m Austrian, we still call them Palatschinken. The extra thin ones are called crepe and the extra thick ones are called pancake, just like the French and English term, respectively. Palatschinken are somewhere in-between.