Languages of Slovenia

Slovenia has been a meeting area of the Slavic, Germanic, Romance, and Uralic linguistic and cultural regions, which makes it one of the most complex meeting point of languages in Europe. The official and national language of Slovenia is Slovene, which is spoken by a large majority of the population. It is also known, in English, as Slovenian. Two minority languages, namely Hungarian and Italian, are recognised as co-official languages and accordingly protected in their residential municipalities. Other significant languages are Croatian and its variants and Serbian, spoken by most immigrants from other countries of former Yugoslavia and their descendants. Slovenia is ranked among the top European countries regarding the knowledge of foreign languages. The most often taught foreign languages are English and German, followed by Italian, French, and Spanish.

The population of Slovenia has become more diverse in regard to its language through recent decades but is still relatively homogenous — Slovene was in 2002 the first language of 87.8% of the inhabitants. It was followed by Croatian (2.8%), Serbian (1.6%) and Serbo-Croatian (1.6%). Italian and Hungarian language, protected by the Constitution of Slovenia, had lower numbers of native speakers.