Official language
At the same time, Slovenian is the mother tongue of around 2.4 million people, of whom around 1.85 million live in Slovenia. Slovenian is an inherently coherent language with social and structural integrity and open to evolving further. We wish it to remain so, and therefore ensure that Slovenian is used and continuously evolving in all areas of public life in our country as well as abroad.
Particularities of the Slovenian language
- It is a South Slavic language and one of the few Indo-European languages that has preserved its dual (grammatical number);
- the alphabet has 25 letters recording 29 sounds;
- it has three grammatical numbers;
- it has six cases, eight declensions and three grammatical genders;
- it has over 40 dialects.
Slovenian language today
Since Slovenia's gaining of independence, the Slovenian language has immediately gained full recognition also in the armed forces, customs service and state protocol, and its use is constantly expanding into new areas opened up by social and technological development: translation of international technical standards, e-mail and websites, the online spell checker and Dictionary of Standard Slovenian, machine translation software and machine analysis, and the synthesis of Slovenian speech.
One of the major challenges faced by the Slovenian language at the beginning of the 21st century was Slovenia’s accession to the European Union, whereby Slovenian obtained the status of one of the EU official languages.