Slovene

Slovene, or Slovenian, is a South Slavic language spoken by about 2.5 million people, principally in Slovenia. It is also used by minority communities in Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia, and by Slovene emigrant communities worldwide. It is the official language of Slovenia and one of the official languages of the European Union.

Classification and history: Slovene belongs to the South Slavic branch of the Indo-European family, closely related to Serbo-Croatian varieties. It developed from Old Slovene and has a literary tradition dating to the 16th century; standard Slovene emerged in the 18th–19th centuries and was codified in the 19th century during efforts to create a unified Slovene literary language. It has been influenced by German, Italian, and Hungarian through centuries of contact, and uses the Latin alphabet with diacritics in its orthography.

Writing system and dialects: Slovene uses the Latin alphabet with diacritics for letters such as č, š, and ž. In addition to the standard language, there are numerous dialects traditionally grouped into major dialect groups, including Carniolan, Styrian, Littoral–Carniolan, Rovte, and Upper and Lower Carniolan; dialects differ in phonology and lexicon, but standard Slovene is used in formal contexts.

Standard language and usage: Standard Slovene is taught in schools and used in government, media, literature, and formal communication. It has several registers and features a distinction of stress and pitch accent in some dialects; vocabulary has borrowed from German, Italian, English, and other languages.

Relation to other languages: Slovene is closely related to Croatian and Bosnian, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility; it forms part of the South Slavic linguistic continuum that includes Serbian and Montenegrin. The language has loanwords from German, Italian, Hungarian, and English.