Language
The official language in Slovenia is Slovene, which is a member of the South Slavic language group. In 2002, Slovene was the native language of around 88% of Slovenia's population according to the census, with more than 92% of the Slovenian population speaking it in their home environment. This places Slovenia among the most homogeneous countries in the EU in terms of the share of speakers of predominant mother tongue. Slovene is sometimes characterized as the most diverse Slavic language in terms of dialects, with different degrees of mutual intelligibility. Accounts of the number of dialects range from as few as seven dialects, often considered dialect groups or dialect bases that are further subdivided into as many as 50 dialects. Other sources characterize the number of dialects as nine or eight.
The distribution of speakers by language is the following: Slovene 87.7%, Serbo-Croatian 8%, Hungarian 0.4%, Albanian 0.4%, Macedonian 0.2%, Romani 0.2%, Italian 0.2%, German 0.1%, other 0.1% (Russian, Czech, Ukrainian, English, Slovak, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, French, Bulgarian, Arabic, Spanish, Dutch, Vlach, Rusyn, Greek, Swedish, Danish or Armenian), unknown 2.7% (2002)
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of Slovenia
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.”
—Frederico Fellini (1920–1993)
“When a language creates—as it does—a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.”
—Christopher Ricks (b. 1933)