Slovene language Totally Explained

Everything about Slovene Language totally explained

Slovene or Slovenian (slovenski jezik or slovenščina) is an Indo-European language that belongs to the family of South Slavic languages. It is spoken by approximately 2 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. Slovene is one of the few languages to have preserved the dual grammatical number from Proto-Indo-European. Also, Slovene and Slovak are the two modern Slavic languages whose names for themselves literally mean "Slavic" (slověnьskъ in old Slavonic). Slovene is also one of the official languages of the European Union.

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 as the Brižinski spomeniki in Slovene; the consensus estimate of their age is between 972 and 1093 (most likely in the later years of the range). These religious writings are the earliest known occurrence of any Slavic language being written using the Latin script (Carolingian minuscule). Moreover, they're 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. For example, in addition to the native Slovene word blazina ('pillow'), the Austrian-German word Polster is also used in colloquial Slovene, wherein it's pronounced poʊʃtər). Similarly, Slovene has both the native term for "screwdriver", izvijač, and šrauf'ncigr, ([ʃraʊfəntsɪgər]) in technical colloquial jargon, from the German word for screwdriver: Schraubenzieher. 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 (Deseti brat/The Tenth Brother, published 1866) used Serbo-Croat 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 suppressed the Slovene language. The Germans were particularly emphatic, issuing propaganda suggesting that German-speaking Slovenes would be treated equally with native-born Germans.
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 (including the army). It also became one of the official languages of the European Union upon Slovenia's admission.
Slovenes often assert that their language is endangered, despite the fact that it now has more speakers than at any point in its history. The British linguist David Crystal said, in an interview in the summer of 2003 for the newspaper Delo:

"No, Slovene isn't 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 isn't 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 ..."

Nature of the language

Slovene belongs to the Western subgroup of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages.

Regulation

Proper Slovene orthography and grammar are sanctioned by the Orthographic Commission and the Fran Ramovš Institute of 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 proper Slovene orthography (and to some extent also grammar) is Slovenski pravopis (Slovene Orthography). The latest printed edition was published in 2001 (reprinted in 2003 with some corrections) and contains more than 130,000 entries. In 2003, an electronic version was published. The official dictionary of modern Slovene language, which is also prepared by SAZU, is called Slovar slovenskega knjižnega jezika (SSKJ; in English Dictionary of the Standard Slovene Language). It was published in five books by Državna založba Slovenije between the years 1970 in 1991 and contains more than 100,000 entries and sub-entries in which the stress, grammar marks, common associations of words and different qualificators are included. In the 1990s, an electronic version of the dictionary was published and is available online.

Dialects

Slovene has many dialects, with different grades of mutual intelligibility. Linguists generally agree that there are about 48 dialects.

Literature

Slovenes are said to be 'a nation of poets' due to their language with such poets as France Prešeren and Edvard Kocbek and writer Ivan Cankar being three of the most prominent Slovene authors; Vladimir Bartol, Srečko Kosovel, Tomaž Šalamun, Boris Pahor, Drago Jančar and Aleš Debeljak are among the most famous.

Bible in Slovene

The New Testament was first translated into Slovene by Primož Trubar (1508-1586), part of the Reformation movement. He also wrote the first book in Slovene. Later, Jurij Dalmatin (1547-1589), a Slovene writer, pastor, hymn writer, poet and translator, living in Ljubljana, translated the Bible in Slovene. He based much of the New Testament on the work of Primož Trubar. At first, the Bibles had to be smuggled into Slovenia (1584). He also wrote a Protestant cathechism in Slovene. Dalmatin's work is seen as the foundation of the written form of the Slovene language. More recently, a new translation of the Bible in Slovene has been produced, under the leadership of Dr. Jože Krašovec, a professor of Old Testament in Ljubljana.

Name in English

The terms Slovene and Slovenian refer to anything related to Slovenia and its inhabitants. Both have been used for a long time in English, and are comparable to the parallel short and long forms Serb/Serbian and Croat/Croatian. A Slovene-Canadian scholar Edward Gobetz claims that the shorter form was carried over into English through French, once the language of diplomacy and that the longer form is the one naturally formed by native speakers of English.
The shorter form is sometimes said to be prevalent in the United Kingdom and in Ireland and the longer form in the US, Canada, Australia. Others claim that the shorter form should be used as a noun (for example, Slovenes) and the longer form as an adjective (for example, Slovenian people). In practice, it's difficult to claim any such pattern. Although somewhat confusing, both terms are widely recognized and acceptable.

Geographic distribution

The language is spoken by about 2.2 million people - there's a table of distribution of Slovenes in the world in the article Slovenes.
Slovenes live mainly in Slovenia in Central Europe (about 2,000,000 in 2006). In addition, the Slovene language has speakers in Venetian Slovenia (Beneška Slovenija) and other parts of Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Furlanija-Julijska krajina) in Italy (more than 100,000), in Carinthia (avstrijska Koroška) and other parts of Austria (25,000), throughout Croatia, especially in Istria, Rijeka and Zagreb (11,800-13,100), in southwestern Hungary (6,000), in Serbia (5,000), as well as dispersed throughout Europe and the rest of the world (around 300,000), particularly in the United States, Canada, Argentina (30,000(External Link

)), Australia and South Africa).

Phonology

Slovene has a phoneme set consisting of 21 consonants and 8 vowels. Like other Slavic languages, it's a very phonetic language and also practices reduction of unstressed vowels.

Vowels

Older analysis 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

Bilabial

Labio- dental		Dental			Palato- alveolar		Palatal		Velar
Nasal	m			n						ɲ
Plosive	p	b		t	d						k	ɡ
Affricate						ts	dz	tʃ	dʒ
Fricative			f			s	z	ʃ	ʒ		x
Approximant			ʋ			l				j
Tap						ɾ

All voiced obstruents are devoiced at the end of words unless immediately followed by a word beginning with a vowel or a voiced consonant. /ʋ/ has several allophones depending on context:

Before a vowel: [ʋ]
At the end of a syllable or before a consonant: [u]
At the beginning of a syllable before a voiced consonant: [w]
At the beginning of a syllable before 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 (to which it's mutually intelligible to an extent), Slovene uses diacritics or accent marks to denote what is called "dynamic accent" and tone. 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 or with the dot below ( ̣ ).

Grammar

Vocabulary

T-V distinction

Slovene, much like the other Balto-Slavic languages (except Polish), German and most Romance languages, uses two forms of 'you' for formal and informal situations. Informal ti is comparable to the archaic English thou and is used in common situations; that is, when speaking to one's peers or inferiors; formal vi is comparable to the archaic English ye as it's used in formal situations such as when speaking to one's superiors, generally any adult acquaintances, all adults who are in a higher position at work, and so forth. As with many other languages that make a T-V distinction, the formal form is treated grammatically as the second-person plural form (for example boste dela l(-a), 'thou wilt work' informal) vs (boste delali, 'you will work' formal).
Slovene also has two special verbs to describe the use of ti and vi.

tikati means to refer to someone as "ti", for example, to be on familiar terms with someone (direct equivalent to French tutoyer).

vikati means to refer to someone as "vi", for example, to be on formal terms with someone (direct equivalent to French vouvoyer). For more information on formality and informality, refer to T-V distinction.

Foreign words

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

sposojenka (loan word) – fully assimilated; for example pica ('pizza').

tujka (foreign word) – partly assimilated, either in writing and syntax and/or in pronunciation; for example jazz, wiki.

polcitatna beseda ali besedna zveza – partly assimilated, either in writing and syntax and/or in pronunciation; for example Shakespeare.

citatna beseda ali besedna zveza – kept as in original, although pronunciation may be altered to fit into speech flow; for example first lady. 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 (abeceda) was derived in the mid 1840s from an using the same Latin characters made by national reviver and leader Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872) for Serbo-Croatian (and all its variants) and the alphabet is called gajica, patterned on the Czech pattern of the 1830s). Before that /ʃ/ was, for example, written as <ʃ>, <ʃʃ> or <ſ>, /tʃ/ as , , or , /i/ sometimes as as a relic from now modern Russian 'yeri' (ы), /j/ as , /l/ as , /ʋ/ as , /ʒ/ as <ʃ>, <ʃʃ> or <ʃz>.
The writing itself in its pure form doesn't use any other signs, except, for instance, additional accentual marks, when it's 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. 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)'),

letter	phoneme	first letter in a word	word pronunciation
A (a)	/a/	abecéda ('alphabet')	[abɛtsed̪a]
B (b)	/b/	beséda ('word')	[bɛsed̪a]
C (c)	/ts/	cvét ('bloom')	[tsʋet̪]
Č (č)	/tʃ/	časopís ('newspaper')	[tʃasɔpis]
D (d)	/d/	dánes ('today')	[d̪anəs]
E (e)	/e/, /ɛ/, /ə/	sédem ('seven'), reči ('to say'), sem ('I am')	[sedəm], [rɛtʃi], [səm]
F (f)	/f/	fànt ('boy')	[fan̪t̪]
G (g)	/g/	grad ('castle')	[ɡrad]
H (h)	/h/	híša ('house')	[xiʃa]
I (i)	/i/	iméti ('to have')	[imeti]
J (j)	/j/	jábolko ('apple')	[jabɔlkɔ]
K (k)	/k/	kmèt ('peasant')	[kmɛt̪]
L (l)	/l/	ljubézèn ('love')	[ljubezɛn]
M (m)	/m/	mísliti ('to think')	[mislit̪i]
N (n)	/n/	novíce ('news')	[nɔʋitsɛ]
O (o)	/ɔ/, /o/	ôkno ('window'), ópica ('monkey)	[ɔkno], [opica]
P (p)	/p/	pomóč ('help')	[pɔmotʃ]
R (r)	/r/	rokenrol ('rock'n'roll')	[rɔkenrɔl]
S (s)	/s/	svét ('world')	[sʋet]
Š (š)	/ʃ/	šóla ('school')	[ʃola]
T (t)	/t/	tip ('type')	[t̪ip]
U (u)	/u/	ulica ('street')	[ulitsa]
V (v)	/ʋ/	vôda ('water')	[ʋɔda]
Z (z)	/z/	zrélo ('mature')	[zrelo]
Ž (ž)	/ʒ/	življènje ('life')	[ʒiuljɛnjɛ]

Examples

Pronunciation differs greatly from area to area, and literary language is only used in a public presentation or on a very formal occasion.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Slovene Language'.

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