• Objectius
• Membres del Comitè
• Redacció de la revista VISAT
• Trobada del T&LRC (Juny 2010)

Slovenia – a country at the crossroads of linguistic diversity

Despite the country's relative smallness the Slovene language belongs among the elite group of the 5% world’s most spoken languages – it is actually 179th most spoken language in the world. Slovene is not an endangered language; it is used as the first language by about 1.85 million people. Except in Slovenia, Slovene is also spoken in Slavia Veneta and Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Italy), in Carinthia (Austria), in Istria (Croatia), in the Raba region (Hungary) and in some parts of Germany, USA, Canada and Australia. In total, some 2.5 million people speak Slovene.

Slovenia is thus a linguistically homogenous country. At the 2002 population census, Slovene was spoken as the mother tongue by 87.8% of people living in Slovenia, while the languages of national minorities – Hungarian and Italian – were spoken by 0.2% of the population, the same as Romany.

However, among Slavic languages Slovene is the most diverse in terms of dialects, spoken in specific geographical areas. There are about 50 dialects still spoken at home or inside closed geographical communities though, according to recent poles, this sort of dialectical diversity is decreasing. Slovene language dialects are joined into seven dialect groups: koroška, primorska, rovtarska, gorenjska, dolenjska, štajerska and panonska with the Northwestern Gorenjsko region the most likely candidate for dialect loss. According to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, Slovenia is also home of one of 11 European languages facing extinction . This is ''kočevarsko'' (the Gottschee language), a mixture of Slovenian and Germanic dialect in the Central Slovenia which is critically endangered as it is only spoken by the older generation.

According to results of all population censuses conducted on the territory of Slovenia after the First World War, Slovene has been the mother tongue of the great majority of the population. However, the share of people whose mother tongue is Slovene has been falling since 1953 (at the 2002 Census it was 87.8%); the decrease was the smallest between the last two censuses. The share of people whose mother tongue is Hungarian has been decreasing, too, while since the 1971 Census the share of people whose mother tongue is Italian has been slightly changing up and down at around 0.2%. On the other hand the shares of people whose mother tongues are Romany and Albanian have been growing. Between the 1991 and 2002 censuses the share of people whose mother tongue is Romany has grown from 0.1% to 0.2%, while the share of people whose mother tongue is Albanian has grown from 0.20% to 0.37%. Among people whose mother tongue is not Slovene, at the 1921 Census the share of German speaking people was the highest at 3.9%. By the 1931 Census their share has decreased to 2.5% and by 1971 it has dropped to 0.1%, which is where it was at the 2002 Census.

Individual language groups of people in Slovenia have significantly different sex structures. Women, mostly autochthon population, prevail as regards Slovene, Italian, Hungarian, German and Romany as mother tongues. Among immigrants, men whose mother tongue is Albanian outnumber women whose mother tongue is Albanian by two to one. As regards immigrants, the difference between the number of men and the number of women is the smallest with people whose mother tongue is the so-called Serbo-Croatian.

Data on foreign language skills of people in Slovenia in 2007 were collected by the 2007 Adult Education Survey. In 2007, 92% of adults aged 25-64 spoke at least one foreign language, which ranked Slovenia among the leading countries in Europe behind Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, Latvia and Slovakia.

In 2007, English was spoken by as many as three quarters of people aged 25-34, by almost half of people aged 35-49 and by more than a quarter of people aged 50-64. About 30% of adults spoke German. The differences between age groups were much smaller. Most of the people speaking German were 50-64 years old. 10% of adults spoke Italian; the shares for the three age groups were the same.
Very few adults in Slovenia spoke French or Russian.

Marjan Strojan, Slovene PEN centre