Slovene

How Primož Trubar shaped the standard

The first printed Slovene words, stara pravda, "old justice", appeared in Vienna in 1515 as the battle cry of rebel peasants, quoted in a poem by the mercenaries who crushed them. The standard came with the Lutheran Reformation. Primož Trubar wrote the first books in Slovene, basing them on the speech of Ljubljana with some of his native Lower Carniolan, and Adam Bohorič wrote the first grammar. Jurij Dalmatin translated the whole Bible. Writers of the revival in the 18th and early 19th centuries, France Prešeren among them, used the Upper Carniolan speech that Ljubljana was growing closer to.

German was the language of the elite on Slovene territory until 1918, and colloquial Slovene still holds many Germanisms. In the 19th century, Illyrism and Pan-Slavism brought in Croatian and Czech words to replace German ones, and Josip Jurčič wrote the first Slovene novel in 1866.

When Slovene was pushed aside

Between 1920 and 1941 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's official language was "Serbo-Croato-Slovene", in practice Serbo-Croatian, although Slovene stayed in schools and administration in Slovenia. Many of the Serbo-Croatian words of those decades were dropped after 1945, so a text from the 1910s often reads closer to modern Slovene than one from the 1930s. Under Italian rule all public use of Slovene was banned from 1923 to 1943. In Carinthia the share of inhabitants using Slovene daily fell from around 21% in 1910 to 2.8% in 2001.

Why Slovene has so many dialects

Counts range from seven dialect groups to as many as 50 dialects, and a proverb says every village has its own voice. Speakers of Prekmurje and Resian are hard for others to understand and switch to the standard, while the rest are mutually intelligible without heavy regionalisms. The alphabet, adopted in the mid-1840s from Ljudevit Gaj's Croatian system, uses the basic Latin letters plus č, š and ž and leaves out q, w, x and y. The Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts regulates the language, and its Slovenski pravopis of 2001 holds more than 130,000 entries.