Slovenian, the odd one out

I translate into English from all official Southern Slavonic languages except one...

Slovenian 🇸🇮

Don't get me wrong! Slovenia is one of my most favourite countries in the world, Slovenians are wonderful people and I find listening to spoken Slovenian delightful.

But the main reason why Slovenian never joined my list of languages is that unlike with all the other Southern Slavonic languages, I was exposed to very little Slovenian as a child. I say this even though there was a huge Slovenian Club (it served amazing Kransky sausages, of course, Slovenia's culinary gift to Australia) not far from where my family lived in Adelaide, Australia, where I grew up.

Actually, the only Slovenian I would regularly see was the "Slovenska Stran", the sole page of news in Slovenian that would appear in Novo Doba, the Australian Yugoslav newspaper that my father had a subscription for and published mainly in Serbo-Croatian (as it was called at the time) and three pages in Macedonian.

However, I've always got on well with Slovenians. I'm of Macedonian origin and grew up when no one ever thought that Yugoslavia would ever disappear, so I feel right at home in any part of former Yugoslavia, including Slovenia.

Slovenians and Macedonians have a special bond in that we were the junior partners, so-to-speak, to the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Montenegrins, who were in a somewhat more privileged position in Yugoslavia being native speakers of Yugoslavia's primary language, Serbo-Croatian. Slovenians, Macedonians and the other linguistic minorities of Yugoslavia had to then learn Serbo-Croatian as a second language. This was not as simple as it would seem given that Slovenian and Macedonian, though related as fellow Southern Slavic languages, have marked differences from Serbo-Croatian. However, the positive from this means that whenever I mention that I'm a Macedonian to Slovenians, we often immediately start speaking in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian without worrying about making possible mistakes.

And it was this 'common' language of Serbo-Croatian that made learning Slovenian for me somewhat unnecessary. Though, if I were to live in Slovenia, I'd be like all the other non-Slovene ex-Yugos and pick up Slovenian very quickly.

One distinguishing aspect about standard Slovenian is that it has a large number of 'false friends' with other Southern Slavic languages. A 'false friend' is not one of those types of backstabbers we've all encountered or a social media bot, but a word in a different language that looks or sounds similar to a word in a given language but differs significantly in meaning. Just like how 'magazin' in French is not the same as 'magazine' in English.

So when I do hear or read Slovenian, I can at times end up like Andrija here (from the Serbian comedy series Andrija i Andjelka, which is massively popular throughout ex-Yugoslavia) dealing with the otherwise simple questions posed to him in Slovenian by a Slovenian border official.

So while I do find that I understand Slovenian only to a degree, there have been times when I've been pleasantly surprised when I have comprehended more Slovenian than I expected. Like this one time...

I had gone to Karlovac, Croatia, to go see the place where my father had served in the Yugoslav People's Army in the late 1960s. After a very cold few hours, I caught the bus back to Croatia's capital, Zagreb. I boarded the bus and took my assigned seat. As is common on intercity buses in the region, the bus driver had the radio on very loudly. Usually there's local Turbofolk music blaring, but this time it was a radio station. Listening to what was being said on what seemed to be an obscure station, I was taken aback at what I thought at first was the awful Croatian that the speakers were communicating in. I mean, we're in Croatia, so what other than a station in Croatian would the driver put on? Perhaps it was in a local dialect then? Anyway, I had a good idea of what they were talking about (agricultural issues), and then as the bus was taking off on the hour, the sound signal for the radio station ringed out and the speakers proudly announced that we dear listeners are listening to... Radio Slovenija! So that was not Croatian Kajkavski but Slovenian. This not to say that Slovenian is just bad Croatian – it certainly isn't, but it does show how the Kajkavski dialect of Croatia traditionally spoken in areas bordering Slovenia, is more related to standard Slovenian than to standard Croatian (which is based on a dialect from Eastern Herzegovina!).

Today is Prešeren Day, the public holiday celebrating Slovenian culture and language, and held on the anniversary of the death of Slovenia's national poet, France Prešeren. I'd like to wish all Slovenes vesel praznik!