Slovene

Marc L. Greenberg

Location: Spoken in the Republic of Slovenia. Significant minorities are found in neighboring territories in Italy, Austria, and Hungary. Diaspora communities are primarily in Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the US.

Family: Together with Serbo-Croatian, Slovene makes up the West South Slavic subgroup of the South Slavic group of the Slavic branch of Indo-European.

Number of Speakers: Approximately 2 million.

In the 6—7th centuries A.D. Slavs began settling in the Eastern Alpine regions, having employed the Danube, Sava and Drava river systems to migrate westward, occupying lands abandoned by the Langobards; southward Slavic migrations of Proto- Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, and Bulgarians resulted in settlement of the Balkan hinterland. These settlements ultimately gave rise to the modern Slovene, Serbo-Croatian (now corresponding to the Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian standard languages), Macedonian and Bulgarian speech territories. The Proto-Slovene territory reached as far west as the Tagliamento River, the Gulf of Trieste, Linz and the outskirts of Vienna to the north, and the southern end of Lake Balaton to the east. Features of South Slavic provenience in the central dialect area of Slovak point to a time when Proto-Slovene was still contiguous with West Slavic. The Slavic state of Carantania, centered around modern Klagenfurt, Austria, was established in the 7th century. In the 9th century, the state came under Frankish domination, an alliance motivated by the Avar threat. Throughout the medieval period, the Proto-Slovene speech territory has gradually diminished as speakers shifted to Friulian, Italian, German and Hungarian, leaving a southern core area today that is equal to the present day Republic of Slovenia plus border areas in Italy, Austria and Hungary.

Although some important contributions were made to Slovene literacy by Catholic intellectuals (notably, the monk and grammarian, Marko Pohlin, 1735—1801), the Slovene language remained secondary to the state language, German and, in the western and northeastern peripheries, Italian and Hungarian. The beginning of the modern Slovene standard language can be dated to the work of Jernej Kopitar (1780—1844), whose Grammatik der slawischen Sprache in Krain, Kärnten und Steyermark (1809) marks the beginning of a language constructed from selected dialect elements and based on historically-supported spelling. The literary language was raised in prestige by the literary efforts of the Romantic poet France Prešeren (1800—1849) and the literary circle around Baron Sigismund Zois (1747—1819). The orthographic system that makes up the modern standard, by and large in the form it is found today, was codified in the Slovene-German Dictionary of Maks Pleteršnik (1840—1923), published in 1894—95.

The Slovene alphabet (abeceda) is a modification of the Roman alphabet, as adapted from Czech by Ljudevit Gaj in the 19th century.

Standard Slovene pronunciation has two accentual norms, one characterized by pitch accent (based on the pattern of the Upper and Lower Carniolan dialects), the other by stress and vowel length. In the pitch-accent system, any long-stressed syllable is characterized by either a low tone (traditionally, "rising" or "acute") or a high tone (trad., "falling" or "circumflex"). Excluding unstressed particles, prepositions, conjunctions, and certain pronouns (such as se [reflexive particle], pri 'by, near' in 'and', ki 'which', en 'a'), words that do not have a long stressed vowel are short-stressed (redundantly high) on the final syllable. Examples: bráti 'to read' (low), brât 'to go read' (high), bràt 'brother' (short); poskòk 'hop' (short). In the non-pitch stress system, the distinction between low and high tone is not realized. Pitch and stress marks are not included in Slovene orthography.

Slovene is an inflecting language. Nouns, pronouns and adjectives agree in case, number, and gender. The cases are nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, and instrumental. The locative and instrumental obligatorily occur with prepositions. In addition to plural and singular, Slovene has separate forms for dual. The genders are feminine, masculine, and neuter.

Singular

Plural

Dual

Slovene verbs distinguish imperfective and perfective aspect, roughly, incomplete vs. completed action. Basic or simplex (unprefixed verbs) are generally imperfective (misliti 'to think') or bi-aspectual (roditi 'to give birth'). Prefixation creates additional, usually perfective meanings, such as premisliti 'to think something through', prinesti 'to bring'; imperfectives are derived by suffixation, as in premišljevati 'to be in the process of thinking something through', prinašati 'to bring (repeatedly), to be in the process of bringing'.

The present tense of the verb distinguishes person and number. Pronouns are usually dropped unless the person is emphasized or reference is switched in the discourse. Second person plural is used also as an honorific for a single addressee. The personal pronouns are given in parentheses in the chart; where two are listed, the first is masculine, the second feminine.

Present

The past and future are compound tenses, made up of an auxiliary verb that inflects for person and number and a participial form that distinguishes gender and number. The past-tense auxiliary is sem, si, je...; the future is bom, boš, bo... (see chart). For example, Premislil sem to 'I thought it through', Premislil bom to 'I shall think it through'. The conditional mood is made up of an uninflected particle bi + the same participle, thus, Presmislil bi to 'I/you/he should/would think it through'.

Auxiliaries

Participle (3rd person past used as an example)

Slovene also distinguishes the infinitive from a secondary infinitive, called the supine, a form expressing intention to perform an action. The supine occurs after verbs of motion. Thus, Moram kositi 'I must mow' (infinitive)—Grem kosit 'I am going to mow' (supine).

Slovene word order is basically Subject-Verb-Object, but word order is said to be free in that the elements may be rearranged for emphasis, as in the following examples:

Generally, clitic elements follow the first verb or noun phrase in the main clause:

In noun phrases the normal order is demonstrative + numeral + adjective + noun.

'There is the train for which we were waiting.'

Slovene as a substratum language and as a language in contact has left its mark on Friulian, German (especially the Bavarian and Tyrolian dialects), Hungarian and Croatian. Influences on Slovene have come from the same languages, as well as Venetian Italian, Dalmatian and Istrian Romance. A number of languages, including Illyrian and continental Celtic, may have made up substrata to Proto-Slovene (or the Romance dialects that preceded it) and are recognizable as trace elements in the vocabulary, e.g., from Celtic Karavanke 'Karawanken Alps', Kranj(ska) 'Carniola'.

'Everyone who knew her liked her.'

'We sat at the table and conversed.'

'The two of them brought father an old newspaper.'

After the incorporation of the Slovene speech territory (minus the Carinthian area, which remained in Austria, the littoral area in Italy, and the Porabje region in Hungary) into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918 (named Yugoslavia in 1929), Slovene was no longer a regional language subordinate to German, but now became subordinate to Serbo-Croatian, the de facto lingua franca of the Yugoslav state. The legal status and prestige of Slovene within the reconstituted, socialist Yugoslavia, was raised after World War II. Its rights as the official language of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia as well as an official Yugoslav state language were reaffirmed by the Yugoslav Federal Constitution of 1974, in which it was declared to be on par with Serbo-Croatian. However, the real situation was markedly asymmetrical, with Slovene enjoying limited rights in Yugoslav state functions as well as some matters within the Republic of Slovenia itself (in particular, the military). In the 1980s leading Slovene intellectuals took issue with the discrepancy between the constitutionalized protection of Slovene and the encroachment of Serbo-Croatian, which they felt a threat to their national identity. Events leading up to the 1991 secession of Slovenia from Yugoslavia frequently centered on language issues, including a staged trial of four Slovenes accused of treason and sedition. This trial was held in Serbo-Croatian within the Slovene Republic, in violation of the sovereignty of Slovene in its own state and of the constitutional rights of the accused. Slovene is now the state language of the independent Republic of Slovenia. Additionally, Italian and Hungarian are accorded official status for administration and education in the coastal region and Prekmurje, respectively.

Slovenes continue to be concerned with the plight of Slovene-speaking minorities in Italy, Austria, and Hungary, where they have attempted to encourage the respective governments to accord language rights and foster Slovene-language education. These efforts have met with limited success.