Slovene language

Slovene/Slovenian
slovenski jezik, slovenščina
Pronunciation	[sloˈʋenski ˈjɛzik], [sloˈʋenʃtʃina]
Spoken in
Region	Central Southern and Southeastern Europe
Total speakers	2.4 million
Ranking	178
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic South Slavic Western South Slavic Slovene/Slovenian
Dialects	Prekmurje dialect Resian
Writing system	Latin alphabet (Slovene variant)
Official status
Official language in	Slovenia  European Union Regional or local official language in:  Austria  Hungary  Italy
Regulated by	Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Language codes
ISO 639-1	sl
ISO 639-2	slv
ISO 639-3	slv
Linguasphere
Slovene-speaking areas
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Slovene or Slovenian (slovenski jezik or slovenščina, not to be confused with Slovak or slovenčina) is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.4 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. Slovene is one of the 23 official and working languages of the European Union.

Standard Slovene

Standard Slovene is the national language that evolved from the Central Slovene dialects in the 18th century and consolidated itself through the 19th and 20th centuries. While distinct regional varieties descended from the older rural dialects still exist, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized. Some dialects differ considerably from the standard language in grammar and vocabulary. Though not facing imminent extinction, such dialects have been in decline during the past century, despite the fact that they are well researched and their use is not discouraged by the authorities. Notable exceptions are the Prekmurje dialect, which is one of the few Slovene dialects in Slovenia still widely used by all strata of the local population, and some Slovene dialects in Italy, most notably the Resian dialect.

The distinctive characteristics of Slovene are dual grammatical number, two accentual norms, one characterized by pitch accent, and abundant inflection (a trait shared with many Slavic languages). Although Slovene is basically a SVO language, word order is very flexible, often adjusted for emphasis or stylistic reasons. Slovene has a T-V distinction: second-person plural forms are used for individuals as a sign of respect. Also, Slovene and Slovak are the two modern Slavic languages whose names for themselves literally mean "Slavic" (slověnьskъ in old Slavonic).

Classification

Alongside Croatian and Serbian, Slovene is an Indo-European language belonging to the Western subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages. It is close to the Kajkavian and Čakavian dialects of Croatian, but is further from the Štokavian dialect, the basis for the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian standard language.^[1]

History

Early history

Like all Slavic languages, Slovene traces its roots to the same proto-Slavic group of languages that produced Old Church Slavonic. The earliest known examples of a distinct, written Slovene dialect are from the Freising Manuscripts, known in Slovene as Brižinski spomeniki. The consensus estimate of their date of origin is between 972 and 1093 (most likely before 1000). These religious writings are among the oldest surviving manuscripts in any Slavic language.

Literary Slovene emerged in the 16th century thanks to the works of Reformation activists Primož Trubar, Adam Bohorič and Jurij Dalmatin. During the period when present-day Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, German was the language of the elite, and Slovene was the language of the common people. During this time, German had a strong impact on Slovene, and many Germanisms are preserved in contemporary colloquial Slovene. Many Slovene scientists before the 1920s also wrote in foreign languages, mostly German, the lingua franca of science at the time.

The cultural movements of Illyrism and Pan-Slavism brought words from Serbo-Croatian and Czech into the language. For example, Josip Jurčič, who wrote the first novel in Slovene, published in 1866, used Serbo-Croatian words in his writing.

Recent history

During World War II, when Slovenia was divided between the Axis Powers of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Hungary, the occupying powers attempted to suppress the Slovene language.

Following World War II, Slovenia became part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Slovene was one of the official languages of the federation. On the territory of Slovenia, it was commonly used in most areas of public life. One important exception was the Yugoslav army where Serbo-Croatian was used exclusively even in Slovenia. National independence has revitalized the language: since 1991, when Slovenia gained independence, Slovene has been used as an official language in all areas of public life. It also became one of the official languages of the European Union upon Slovenia's admission in 2004.

Slovenes often assert that their language is endangered,^[2][3] despite the fact that it now has more speakers than at any point in its history. British linguist David Crystal said, in an interview in the summer of 2003 for the newspaper Delo:

No, Slovene is not condemned to death. At least not in the foreseeable future. The number of speakers, two million, is big. Welsh has merely 500,000 speakers. Statistically, spoken Slovene with two million speakers comes into the upper 10 per cent of the world's languages. Most languages of the world have very few speakers. Two million is a nice number: magnificent, brilliant. One probably would think this number is not much. But from the point of view of the whole world, this number has its weight. On the other hand, a language is never self-sufficient. It can disappear even in just one generation ...

Geographic distribution

The language is spoken by about 2.4 million people, mainly in Slovenia, but also by Slovene national minorities in Venetian Slovenia and other parts of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in Italy (more than 100,000), in Carinthia and other parts of Austria (25,000). It is also spoken in Croatia, especially in Istria, Rijeka and Zagreb (11,800-13,100), in southwestern Hungary (3-5,000), in Serbia (5,000), and by the Slovene diaspora throughout Europe and the rest of the world (around 300,000), particularly in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia and South Africa.^[1]

Dialects

A schematic map of Slovene dialects, based on the map by Fran Ramovš and other sources

Slovene has many dialects, with different grades of mutual intelligibility. Linguists generally agree that there are about 48 dialects.^[1] Pronunciation differs greatly from area to area, and literary language is mainly used in public presentations or on formal occasions. The Prekmurian dialect and Resian dialect have been standardized.

Phonology

Slovene has a phoneme set consisting of 21 consonants and 8 vowels, and practices reduction of unstressed vowels.

Vowels

Older analyses of Slovene concluded that it features phonemic vowel length, but more recent studies have rejected this statement for the majority of speakers. The current analysis is that stressed vowels are long while unstressed vowels are short. All vowels can be either stressed or unstressed. However, unstressed /e/ and /o/ are restricted to a few grammatical words like bo ('will'), an auxiliary verb for the future tense.

Consonants

Slovene has 21 distinctive consonant phonemes. Conditional allophones are shown in parentheses.

All voiced obstruents are devoiced at the end of words unless immediately followed by a word beginning with a vowel or a voiced consonant. In consonant clusters, voicing distinction is neutralized and all consonants assimilate the voicing of the rightmost segment. In this context, [ɣ] and [d͡z] may occur as voiced allophones of /x/ and /t͡s/, respectively (e.g. vŕh drevésa [ʋrɣ dreˈʋesa]).^[5] /ʋ/ has several allophones depending on context:

• Before a vowel: [ʋ]
• At the end of a syllable or before a consonant: [u̯]
• At the beginning of a syllable behind a voiced consonant: [w]
• At the beginning of a syllable behind a voiceless consonant: [ʍ]

The preposition v is always bound to the following word; however its phonetic realization follows the normal phonological rules for /ʋ/.

Prosody

Like the closely-related Serbo-Croatian, Slovene uses diacritics or accent marks to denote what is called "dynamic accent" and tone. However, as in Serbo-Croatian, use of such accent marks is restricted to language textbooks and linguistic publications. Standard Slovene has two varieties, tonal and non-tonal. The diacritics are almost never used in the written language, except in the few minimal pairs that are already mentioned.

Dynamic accent marks lexical stress in a word as well as vowel duration. Stress placement in Slovene is predictable compared to the East Slavic languages and Bulgarian: any long vowel is automatically stressed, and in words with no long vowels, the stress falls to the final syllable. The only exception is schwa, which is always short, and can be stressed in non-final position. Some compounds, but not all, have multiple stress. In the Slovene writing system, dynamic accent marks may be placed on all vowels, as well as /ɾ/ (which is never syllabic in Standard Slovene, but is used for schwa + r sequences, when in consonantal environment); for example, vrt ('garden') stressed as vŕt. In short, stress can theoretically fall on any syllable. In practice, the second or third syllable from the end are commonly stressed.

Dynamic accentuation uses three diacritic marks: the acute ( ´ ) (long and narrow), the circumflex ( ^ ) (long and wide) and the grave ( ` ) (short and wide).

Tonal accentuation uses four: the acute ( ´ ) (long and high), the inverted breve (  ̑ ) or the circumflex ( ^ ) (long and low), the grave ( ` ) (short and high) and the double grave ( `` ) (short and low), marking the narrow <e> or <o> with the dot below (  ̣ ).

Grammar

Vocabulary

T-V distinction

Tombstone of Jožef Nahtigal in Dobrova with archaic Slovene onikanje in indirect reference. Literal translation "Here lie [počivajo] the honorable Jožef Nahtigal ... they were born [rojeni] ... they died [umerli] ... God grant them [jim] eternal peace and rest."

Slovene, like most other European languages, has a T-V distinction, or two forms of 'you' for formal and informal situations. Although informal address using the 2nd person singular ti form (known as tikanje) is officially limited to friends and family, talk among children, and addressing animals, it is increasingly used among the middle generation to signal a relaxed attitude or lifestyle instead of its polite or formal counterpart using the 2nd person plural vi form (known as vikanje).

An additional nonstandard but widespread use of a singular participle combined with a plural auxiliary verb (known as polvikanje) signals a somewhat more friendly and less formal attitude while maintaining politeness:

• Vi ga niste videli. ('You did not see him': both the auxiliary verb niste and the participle videli are plural masculine.)
• Vi ga niste videl/videla. ('You did not see him': the auxiliary verb niste is plural but the participle videl/videla is singular masculine/feminine.)

The use of the 3rd person plural oni form (known as onikanje in both direct address and indirect reference) as an ultra-polite form is now archaic or dialectal; it is associated with servant-master relationships in older literature, the child-parent relationship in certain conservative rural communities, and parishoner-priest relationships.

Foreign words

Foreign words used in Slovene are of various types depending on the assimilation they have undergone. The types are:

• sposojenka (loan word) – fully assimilated; e.g. pica ('pizza').
• tujka (foreign word) – partly assimilated, either in writing and syntax and/or in pronunciation; e.g. jazz, wiki.
• polcitatna beseda ali besedna zveza – partly assimilated, either in writing and syntax and/or in pronunciation; e.g. Shakespeare.
• citatna beseda ali besedna zveza – kept as in original, although pronunciation may be altered to fit into speech flow; e.g. first lady.

Articles

There are no definite or indefinite articles as in English (a, an, the) or German (der, die, das, ein, eine, ein). A whole verb or a noun is described without articles and the grammatical gender is found from the word's termination. It is enough to say barka (a or the barge), Noetova barka ('Noah's ark'). The gender is known in this case to be feminine. In declensions, endings are normally changed; see below. If one should like to somehow distinguish between definiteness or indefiniteness of a noun, one would say (prav/natanko/ravno) tista barka ('that (exact) barge') for "the barge" and neka/ena barka ('one barge') for "a barge". Another indicator is in the ending of the adjective accompanying the noun rdeči šotor ('exactly that red tent or for a special (red) type of tent') or rdeč šotor ('a red tent').

Numbers

Writing system

This alphabet (Slovene: abeceda) was derived in the mid 1840s from the system created by Croatianist Ljudevit Gaj. Intended for Serbo-Croatian language (in all its varieties), it was patterned on the Czech pattern of the 1830s. Before that /s/ was, for example, written as ‹ʃ›, ‹ʃʃ› or ‹ſ›; /tʃ/ as ‹tʃch, ‹cz›, ‹tʃcz› or ‹tcz›; /i/ sometimes as ‹y› as a relic from now modern Russian yery ‹ы› ; /j/ as ‹y›; /l/ as ‹ll›; /ʋ/ as ‹w›; /ʒ/ as ‹ʃ›, ‹ʃʃ› or ‹ʃz›.

The writing itself in its pure form does not use any letters beyond the basic Latin set plus ‹č›, ‹š›, and ‹ž›, except optional diacritics when it is necessary to distinguish between similar words with a different meaning. Note that these are usually not written and the reader is expected to gather the meaning of the word from the context. When diacritics are not used, the orthography underdifferentiates the phonemes /e/, /ɛ/ and /ə/, which are all written ‹e›, and the phonemes /ɔ/ and /o/, which are both written ‹o›. For example:

• gòl ('naked') vs. gól ('goal'),
• jêsen ('ash (tree)') vs. jesén ('autumn'),
• kót ('angle') vs. kot ('as'),
• med ('between') vs. méd ('honey'),
• polovíca ('half (of)') vs. pôl ('expresses a half an hour before the given hour') vs. pól ('pole'),
• prècej ('at once', archaic) vs. precéj ('a great deal (of)'),

Regulation

Standard Slovene spelling and grammar are defined by the Orthographic Committee and the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language, which are both part of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti, SAZU). The newest reference book of standard Slovene spelling (and to some extent also grammar) is the Slovenski pravopis (Slovene Normative Guide). The latest printed edition was published in 2001 (reprinted in 2003 with some corrections) and contains more than 130,000 dictionary entries. In 2003, an electronic version was published. The official dictionary of modern Slovene, which was also prepared by SAZU, is Slovar slovenskega knjižnega jezika (SSKJ; Standard Slovene Dictionary). It was published in five volumes by Državna Založba Slovenije between 1970 in 1991 and contains more than 100,000 entries and subentries with accentuation, part-of-speech labels, common collocations, and various qualifiers. In the 1990s, an electronic version of the dictionary was published and it is available online.

See also

• List of radio stations in Slovenia

References

Further reading

• Herrity, Peter (2000). Slovene: A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge. ISBN 0415231477. 
• International Phonetic Association (1999) Handbook of the International Phonetic Association ISBN 0-521-63751-1
• SEELRC Reference Grammar Network - A Short Reference Grammar of Standard Slovene, in PDF format with indexed links

External links

• Slovene language at Ethnologue
• Centre for Slovene as a Second/Foreign Language
• Slovenian Phonology

Corpora

• 600 M words corpus of Slovenian FidaPLUS
• 200 M words corpus of Slovenian Nova beseda
• Slovene-English Parallel Corpus

Dictionaries

• Slovene-English Dictionary
• Standard Slovene Dictionary (SSKJ) (Slovene)

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