Slovenian Language

Slovenian Language, the official language of the Republic of Slovenia and native language of the nearly two million Slovenes in it. It is also spoken by a significant number of émigrés in Austria, Hungary, Italy, the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. It constitutes, together with Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, the western group of the South Slavic languages. Slovenian uses the Latin alphabet with diacritic marks on three letters: č, š, ž are pronounced ch, sh, and zh. The letter j is pronounced like English y (as in German), and h is pronounced like German or Scottish ch.

The oldest identifiably Slovenian text is from about the year 1000, but regular writing and printing in Slovenian began only in 1551 in connection with the Reformation. After about 1600, Slovenian declined as a written language until the modern literary language was defined during the first half of the 19th century, above all by the great poet France Prešeren.

Slovenian has preserved the six cases of Common Slavic (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and locative), although the last two are only used with prepositions. The vocative form has been lost. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs all have a dual number (for two of something: bova delali v Ljubljani “we two (feminine) will work in Ljubljana”), as well as the usual singular and plural. Verbs have been simplified, and now have only one past tense, a present, and a future. The archaic supine (verbal noun) has been preserved, along with the infinitive. The verbal category of aspect has been expanded, as in other Slavic languages.

In spite of the small size of Slovenia, the dialects of Slovenian differ greatly from each other. There is not even agreement on the exact number of dialects, although most scholars classify seven or eight major dialects and about fifty individual dialects.