Language

Language The French novelist Charles Nodier ( 1780 – 1844 ), who lived and worked in Ljubljana for a couple of years in the early 19th century Once wrote that Slovenia was like 'an Academy of Arts and Sciences' because of the people's flair for speaking foreign lauguages. Monseur Nodier would be happy to know they still have that talent almost two centures down the track. Viritually everyone in Slovenia speaks at least one other language. In the 1991 census, 88% said they knew Croatian and Serbian, 45% German 37%, were conservant in English and 17% spoke Italian.But those figures require further explenation. Italian is really useful in Primorska and small patr in Notranjska. German, once the language of education and the elite, is spoken moustly the older people, especcialy in Koroška, Štajeska and nothern Gorenjska. There may be fever speakers of English than German overall, but it is definitely the preferd language of the young, with 84% of all students claming knowlenge of it. Most speak English very well indeed, even if they pepper their speech with 'Slovenglish' slang like »full cool«, meaning very hip or »fashionable. The fact that you will rarely have difficulty in making yourself understood and that you will never 'need' Slovene shouldn't stop you fromlearning a few words and phases of this rich language. More than anything else, Slovene has kept the Slovenian nation ( narod ) alive and united as a culture over centuries of domination and brutality. And despite all attems to destroy it, it is very much alive, dynamic and organic. Any effort on your part to speak it will be relewarded one-hunderdfold. Slovene ( Slovenscina ) is a South Slavic language written in the Roman alphabet. It is closely related to Croatian and Serbian, but the languages are not mutually intellgible. Linguists have no fever than 50 dialects and subdialects in little Slovenia, though the 'purest' form of the language is said to be spoken in north – western Dolenjska. Slovene grammaticly complex with six cases for nouns, adjectives and pronouns, three genders of four verb tenses. In addition to singular and plural, Slovene has something very rare in linguistics: The dual number. It's one table and three or more tables but two tables ( mizi ) . It may not sound too complicated at first, but remeber that there are special case endings for

masculine, fenimine and neuter nouns in the singular, the plural and the dual. More bad news is that thereare a lot of irregularities in verbal conjugations and noun declensions. And the good news? Adjectives precede the noun as in English and there no articles ' a table or ' the table ' is just a table.