| Group | Slavic (with Russian, Polish etc.), Southern branch (with Bulgarian, Slovene, Macedonian) |
| Geography | Spoken not only in Slovenia, but also in the neghbouring districts of Austria and Italy. Approximateyl, there are 49 dialects which are unified in 7 groups. |
| History | The most ancient document written in one of the Old Slovene dialects is the Freising manuscript dating back to the 10th century. The revival of the Slovene language was the result of the spreading Protestantism in the 17th century when Primoz Trubar translated the Bible into the Dolen' dialect - today's literature Slovene. After Slovenia got its independence in 1991, the language began to develop independently as well. |
| Phonetics | In phonetics, Slovene demonstrates dropping a lot of unstressed vowels, though it is not often reflected in writing (misliti [mislt]). Still, the structure of Slavic vowels and consonants remains untouched: vowels can be log and short, the sound [r] can also act as a vowel (smrt 'death'). The Common Slavic *dj turned to j in Slovene - this is unique among Slavic tongues. |
| Morphology | Together with a number of innovations, Slovene has preserved quite archaic features of morphology. The neutewr gender tends to be lost in some dialects (jajce 'egg' > jajc (masc.) or jajca (fem.), the simple past tenses have been dropped replaced by a perfect complex form with an auxiliary verb (jaz sem delal 'I did'). Still, Slovene is one of the few modern Indo-European languages which uses the dual number both in the noun and in the verb. A difference between long (pronominal) and short consonants is also kept, as well as some peculiar moods of the verb. Both future and subjunctive are formed analytically (jaz bom delal 'I will do', jaz bi delal 'I would do'). |
| Lexicon | Slovene has contacted much with German and Italian, and borrowed a considerable number of words from them. |
| Writing | Latin alphabet |
| Close Contacts | Of all South Slavic languages, Slovene is the least similar to the tongues of the Balkan unity. It is more similar to such West Slavic tongues, as Czech and Slovak. |
| Sample | "Vprašal sem jo, če imajo prosto sobo za štiri za eno noč.
Vprašala me je, če imam rezervacijo. Povedal sem ji, da je imam in rekla
je, da trenutno nimajo nobene proste sobe in da je ob jezeru vse zasedeno."
"I asked her if they had a room free for four for a night. She asked me if I had a reservation. I told her that I didn't and she said that they haven't got any empty rooms at the moment and that everything by the lake was booked." (Teach Yourself Slovene.) |
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