Slovene Language - Classification

Classification

Slovene is an Indo-European language belonging to the Western subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages, like Serbian and Croatian. It is close to the Kajkavian and Čakavian dialects of Croatian, but further from the Štokavian dialect, the basis for the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian standard languages. Furthermore, Slovene shares certain linguistic characteristics with the whole group of the South Slavic languages, including its Eastern subgroup variants such as Bulgarian. While Slovene is almost completely intelligible with Kajkavian Croatian dialects (especially the variant spoken in Hrvatsko Zagorje on the border with Slovenia), mutual intelligibility with other variants of Croatian is hindered by differences in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. The Slovene language also has many commonalities with the West Slavic languages.