Slovenian: what sets it apart, and how long it takes

One of the very few languages left with a working dual number, and a dialect map that is out of proportion to its size.

FamilyProto-Indo-European › Balto-Slavic › Slavic › South Slavic › Slovenian

ScriptLatin with diacritics

Speakers2M 2M native · 0k second

Weeks to a working level44 Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.

The first hundred words cover47.1% and the first thousand 72.2%

What sets it apart

It has a dual: separate forms for exactly two people or things, distinct from both singular and plural. Almost nothing else in Europe kept it.
Two million speakers and around fifty dialect groups, some of which are genuinely hard for other Slovenians to follow.
Six cases, three genders, and a stress that moves.
Its national holiday for culture commemorates a poet, France Prešeren, and the anthem is a stanza of his.
It sits between Italian, German, Hungarian and Croatian, and has taken something from each.

What it opens

One of the last languages on Earth with the dual: a full grammatical number just for two of something. Two million speakers, forty dialects, Alps included. Lake Bled, Ljubljana's dragon bridges, and the dual number: the only place where grammar itself is romantic about couples.

Words with no translation

hrepenenje

hreh-peh-NEH-nyeh

Yearning for something higher, kept alive precisely because it is never reached

The engine of Slovene literature, and close to a national self-description.
It is not sadness at losing something. It is the pull toward something never had, which the culture treats as a productive condition rather than a problem to be solved.

All the untranslatable words →

Next to its neighbours

Where Slovenian parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Slovenian vs Bosnian → Slovenian vs Bulgarian → Slovenian vs Serbian →

Where to practise it

Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Slovenian with.

The Slovenian Passepartout is not out yet

Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.

Leaving takes one click.

Stories in Slovenian

Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.

Slovenian in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →