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:
“Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy flame is blown abroad from all the heights,
Through all the nations, and a sound is heard,
As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes,
In their own language hear thy wondrous word,
And many are amazed and many doubt.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
—Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)