Marc L. Greenberg Book order

Slovene (or Slovenian) is the language of ca. 2 million speakers in the Republic of Slovenia and neighboring areas of Italy, Austria, and Hungary, as well as of diaspora speakers in Australia and North and South America. Until 1990 it was one of the federal and republican languages of Yugoslavia and since Slovenia's accession to the European Union in 2004 one of the official languages of the E.U. The westernmost language of the South Slavic group, Slovene is noted for its pitch-accent system, opposition of singular-plural-dual, distinction of infinitival and supine forms, as well as its remarkable diatopic variation (some 48 dialects). The present grammar sketches the main grammar points of the standard language, with an emphasis on contemporary usage in speech and writing and an attempt to provide exemplification with rich context. Some attention is given to social and stylistic variation, including a sketch of the main phonological discrepancies between the spoken language of Ljubljana (the national capital), and the standard language, which is based on an idealized form of Ljubljana city speech from the 16th century and a selection of features from various dialects in the territory of the Republic. It goes beyond other grammars also in its exemplification and analysis of discourse markers as used both in contemporary writing and formal speech, primarily as attested in transcripts of parliamentary debate.

The work gives the first synthetic and comprehensive account of the historical phonology of Slovene from the time of the arrival of Slavs in the Alpine and Balkan regions (ca. the seventh century A. D.) to the present day. Though previous scholarship has been consulted and cited for every change, many new explanations are proposed that significantly alter the received view of the dialect differentiation of the Slovene speech territory. Changes are discussed in terms of relative and, where possible, absolute chronology. Evidence for innovations has been culled from both textual as well as dialect sources. The relative dearth of textual evidence for Slovene from the eleventh century to the sixteenth is partially compensated for by onomastic as well as rich dialect data (Slovene, spoken by some 2 million speakers, is divided into 48 dialects). For this reason, onomastic and dialectological evidence, the latter in part gathered from author's own field notes, has been relied upon substantially. The relationships of Slovene to other Slavic languages (especially Serbo-Croatian, Czech and Slovak), as well as innovations conditioned by contact with Romance (Friulian, Dalmatian, Venetian, Italien), German and Hungarian, are discussed. An annotated overview of the complex and highly variegated vowel systems found in Slovene dialects, compared with those of the modern standard language, is given in an appendix.