Slovenian language
Slovenian, or Slovene (which is rapidly becoming an archaic form) language (= slovenski) jezik (Slovenian (slovenščina)) is the westernmost language in the South Slav branch of the Slavic languages group.
Classification and spoken areas
| Language codes | ||
|---|---|---|
| SIL Code, SLV |
ISO 639-1, sl |
ISO 639-2, slv |
| Preferred Character encodings / Writing codes | ||
| UTF-8 | ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) |
Unicode |
| Letters Statistics | # of letters | 25 | # of vowels | 5 in writing, 8 in speech | # of consonants | 20 | # of grammatical numbers | 3 | # of cases | 6 | # of noun classes | 3+plural form |
The language is spoken by about 2.2 million people, the Slovenians living mostly in Central Europe in their native independent land Slovenia (1,727,360), plus the Slovenians in Venetian Slovenia (Beneška Slovenija) in Italy (100,000), in Austrian Carinthia (avstrijska Koroška) in Austria (50,000), in Croatian Istria (hrvaška Istra) in Croatia (25,000), in some southern parts of Hungary (6,000) and the Slovenians dispersed across Europe and all over the world (specially German Slovenians, American Slovenians, or even Kansas' Slovenians, Canadian Slovenians, Argentinian Slovenians, Australian Slovenians, South African Slovenians) (300,000). It is one of the rare Slavic languages that have preserved the dual grammatical number (like the Upper and Lower Sorbian language) and it has a very difficult noun case system.
- English philologist David Crystal said in an interview of summer 2003 for the newspaper Delo about Slovenian: No, Slovenian is not convicted to death. At least not in a near future. The number of 2 million speakers is big. Welsh has just 500,000 speakers. Statistically spoken Slovenian with 2 million speakers comes into the upper 10 % of the world's languages. Most languages of the world have very few speakers. Two million is a nice number, magnificent, brilliant. You probably would think this number is not much. But from the point of the whole world, this number has its weight. On the other side about some language no one can be self-satisfied. A language can disappear in just one generation...
Origin of the language and writing, borrowings, orthography, modern writing, computer writing
The earliest manuscripts, written in Slovenian, are the Brižinski spomeniki (Freising manuscripts or Freising monuments, German Freisinger Denkmäler) found in the parchment manuscript miscellany, which in 1803 came from the Bavarian city of Freising (translated to Slovenian in 1854 by Slovenian Slavist and grammarian Anton Janežič as Brizno, Brižnik or later adopted Brižinje, Brižine or Brižinj), where there was once a diocese, to State library in Munich. In this manuscript with a liturgic - homiletic content they had found in 1807 three Slovenian records. This miscellany was probably an episcopal manual (pontificals) and Brižinski spomeniki in it were created between 972 and 1093, but most probably before 1000. The main support for this dating is the writing which was used in the centuries after Charlemagne and is named Caroline minuscule or Carolingian minuscule. ([1] [1] [1]).
This language was for a very long time a secondary language, the language of the masses in Slovenia during the period of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918, when the German language had primacy and for a short period during the World War II, when Slovenia was divided between the Fascist Italian and the Nazi German hegemony. Because of a strong germanization, the Slovenian language retains a lot of Germanisms, which are preserved in a special way for example: German das Polster (pillow (blazina)) in Slovenian colloquial language is spoken poušter and German der Schraubenzieher (screwdriver (izvijač)) in technical colloquial jargon is šrauf'ncigr or šrauf'nciger.
Slovenian uses a modified Latin alphabet and its modern alphabet consists of 25 unique small and unique 25 capital letters and thus one-letter characters:
- a, b, c, č, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, š, t, u, v, z, ž,
- A, B, C, Č, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, Š, T, U, V, Z, Ž.
In the old alphabet used by most distinguished writers, "bohoričica", developed by Adam Bohorič, the characters č, š and ž would be spelt as zh, ∫h and sh respectively, whereas c, s and z would be spelt as z, ∫ and s. To remedy this, so that each vocal sound would have a written equivalent, Jernej Kopitar urged development of new alphabets.
In 1825, Franc Serafin Metelko proposed his version of the Slovenian alphabet, called "metelčica". However, it was banned in 1833 in favour of the bohoričica after the so-called Suit of the Letters (Črkarska pravda) (1830 - 1833), won by France Prešeren and Matija Čop. Another alphabet, "dajnčica", was developed by Peter Dajnko in 1824, which did not catch on as much as metelčica; it was banned in 1838. The reason for them being banned is because they mix Latin and Cyrillic characters, which was seen as a bad way to handle missing characters.
The gajica was adopted afterwards, however it still does not feature all characters the language has. In speech, there are 8 distinct vowels (a, wide e, narrow e, i, wide o, narrow o, u, semivowel (e)), whereas in writing, there are only 5. Also, many consonants are pronounced differently depending on their position in between other characters (thus, the letter v has 3 different pronunciations), when there is only one written character.
There are 5 letters for vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and 20 for consonants. The Western Q, W, X, Y are excluded from the pure language, as are some Southern Slavic characters, Ć, DŽ, Đ, LJ, NJ, but in encyclopedia's and dictionary's listings they are used, because foreign Western proper nouns or toponyms are not translated in full, as they are in some other Slavic languages, such as partly in Russian or entirely in Serbian. Such an encyclopedic listing would have this modified Latin alphabet:
- a, b, c, č, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, š, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, ž.
In the original ASCII frame of 1 to 126 characters we can find these examples of writing Slovenian text:
- a, b, c, *c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, *s, t, u, v, z, *z
- a, b, c, "c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, "s, t, u, v, z, "z
- a, b, c, c(, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, s(, t, u, v, z, z(
- a, b, c, c^, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, s^, t, u, v, z, z^
Many well known global placenames have their own special Slovenian names:
