Language:
Slovenian
1 What do you know about your language?
What do you already know about the Slovenian language? Share your ideas with the class.
Do you know why these people are famous?
Primož Trubar
Adam Bohorič
Jurij Dalmatin
2 The history of Slovenian
Read the text, then mark the sentences true or false.
The history of the Slovenian language began in the 6th century, when the Slavs migrated from Eastern Europe. During the next few centuries, Slovenian gradually developed as an independent language. The earliest known records of written Slovenian are in the Freising Manuscripts – ‘Brižinski spomeniki’ – written in about 1000 AD. Slovenian was spoken across a wide area, including a large part of present-day Austria. Documents were written in Latin or German.
Primož Trubar (1508–1586) was the author of the first book to be printed in the Slovenian language. Trubar was a Protestant reformer, at the time of Martin Luther. Thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, his book was published in 1550, in present-day Germany. Trubar later wrote 25 more books in Slovenian.
During the Reformation, Protestant scholars started translating the Bible into Slovenian. In 1584, the complete Slovenian translation of the Bible was published, written by Jurij Dalmatin. In the same year Adam Bohorič published the first Slovenian grammar book.
In the 19th century, the Slovenian language started to be used in schools and in school books. For a time, Slovenian was adopted as the official language of education, administration and the media in some areas. In the 1840s, a modernised Slovenian alphabet, based on the Latin alphabet, was developed. In 1866, Josip Jurčič published the first novel written in Slovenian.
At the end of World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, Slovenian became the official language in the territory of present-day Slovenia for the first time. Between 1921 and 1941, when Slovenia was part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, which later changed its name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Slovenian was an official language together with Serbo-Croat. After World War II, it became one of the official languages of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The first official dictionary of modern Slovenian was published, in five books, between 1970 and 1991.
When Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004, Slovenian became one of the official languages of the EU. Today it is spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide, most of them in Slovenia. It is the first language of approximately 1.85 million people.
3 Make a time line
Read the text again and find the most important dates in the development of the Slovenian language. Write the dates and, for each date, write one sentence about what happened.