Slovenian Dialects and the Social Diversity of the Slovenian Language

Abstract

The Slovenian language is one of the smallest Slavic languages in terms of the number of speakers and it is additionally characterized by strong social differentiation. It has a literary variant (slovenski knjižni jezik), which differentiates the written language (knjižna zborna zvrst) and the spoken language (knjižna pogovorna zvrst). In addition to the literary variant, there is a non-literary variant of the language (neknjižni jezik), comprising regional variants (pokrajinski pogovorni jeziki) and dialects (narečja). Among them, seven main groups can be distinguished: Carinthian (koroška), Littoral (primorska), Rovte (rovtarska), Upper Carniolan (gorenjska), Lower Carniolan (dolenjska), Styrian (štajerska) and Pannonian (panonska). The article begins with a brief historical outline and a description of the different variants of Slovenian. This is needed to understand the phenomenon of Slovenian social differentiation and to show the place of dialects in it. The main objective is to characterise the individual Slovenian dialects in terms of their selected intrinsic features