Its grammar is highly fusional, and it has a dual grammatical number, an archaic feature shared with some other Indo-European languages.

Its flexible word order is often adjusted for emphasis or stylistic reasons, although basically it is an SVO language.

It has a T–V distinction: the use of the V-form demonstrates a respectful attitude towards superiors and the elderly, while it can be sidestepped through the passive form.

[13][14] Trubar's choice was also later adopted by other Protestant writers in the 16th century, and ultimately led to the formation of a more standard language.

The Upper dialect was also used by most authors during the language revival in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and was also the language spoken by France Prešeren, who, like most Slovene writers and poets, lived and worked in Ljubljana, where the speech was growing closer to the Upper Carniolan dialect group.

[15] Furthermore, Slovene shares certain linguistic characteristics with all South Slavic languages, including those of the Eastern subgroup, namely Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Torlakian dialects.

The Freising manuscripts are a record of a proto-Slovene that was spoken in a more scattered territory than modern Slovene, which included most of the present-day Austrian states of Carinthia and Styria, as well as East Tyrol, the Val Pusteria in South Tyrol, and some areas of Upper and Lower Austria.

This linguistic border remained almost unchanged until the late 19th century, when a second process of Germanization took place, mostly in Carinthia.

During most of the Middle Ages, Slovene was a vernacular language of the peasantry, although it was also spoken in most of the towns on Slovenian territory, together with German or Italian.

Many Slovene scientists before the 1920s also wrote in foreign languages, mostly German, which was the lingua franca of science throughout Central Europe at the time.

In the second half of the 19th century, many nationalist authors made an abundant use of Serbo-Croatian words: among them were Fran Levstik and Josip Jurčič, who wrote the first novel in Slovene in 1866.

This tendency was reversed in the Fin de siècle period by the first generation of modernist Slovene authors (most notably the writer Ivan Cankar), who resorted to a more "pure" and simple language without excessive Serbo-Croatian borrowings.

During the same time, western Slovenia (the Slovenian Littoral and the western districts of Inner Carniola) was under Italian administration and subjected to a violent policy of Fascist Italianization; the same policy was applied to Slovene speakers in Venetian Slovenia, Gorizia, and Trieste.

After the Carinthian Plebiscite of 1920, a less severe policy of Germanization took place in the Slovene-speaking areas of southern Carinthia which remained under Austrian administration.

During World War II, Slovenia was divided among the Axis Powers of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Hungary.

Nonetheless, the post-breakup influence of Serbo-Croatian on Slovene continued to a lesser extent, most prominently in slang in colloquial language.

[23] Joža Mahnič, a literary historian and president of the publishing house Slovenska matica, said in February 2008 that Slovene is a language rich enough to express everything, including the most sophisticated and specialised texts.

It is also spoken in Rijeka and Zagreb (11,800-13,100), in southwestern Hungary (3–5,000), in Serbia (5,000), and by the Slovene diaspora throughout Europe and the rest of the world (around 300,000), particularly in the United States (most notably Ohio, home to an estimated 3,400 speakers),[32] Canada, Argentina, Australia, and South Africa.

[15] Slovene is sometimes characterized as the most diverse Slavic language in terms of its dialects,[33] with different degrees of mutual intelligibility.

[41] The Slovene proverb "Every village has its own voice" (Vsaka vas ima svoj glas) depicts the differences in dialects.

[citation needed] Some loanwords have become so deeply rooted in the local language that people have considerable difficulties in finding a standard expression for the dialect term (for instance, kremšnita meaning a type of custard cake is kremna rezina in Standard Slovene, but the latter term is very rarely used in speech, being considered inappropriate for non-literary registers[where?]).

In this context, [v], [ɣ], and [d͡z] may occur as voiced allophones of /f/, /x/, and /t͡s/, respectively (e.g., vŕh drevésa [ʋrɣ dreˈʋesa]).

All other nouns are inanimate, including plants and other non-moving life forms, and also groups of people or animals.

Although informal address using the 2nd person singular ti form (known as tikanje) is officially limited to friends and family, talk among children, and addressing animals, it is increasingly used among the middle generation to signal a relaxed attitude or lifestyle instead of its polite or formal counterpart using the 2nd person plural vi form (known as vikanje).

An additional nonstandard but widespread use of a singular participle combined with a plural auxiliary verb (known as polvikanje) signals a somewhat more friendly and less formal attitude while maintaining politeness: The use of nonstandard forms (polvikanje) might be frowned upon by many people and would not likely be used in a formal setting.

The types are: The loanwords are mostly from German and Italian, while the more recently borrowed and less assimilated words are typically from English.

[citation needed] This alphabet (abeceda) was derived in the mid-1840s from the system created by the Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj.

The standard Slovene orthography, employed in almost all situations, uses only the letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus ⟨č⟩, ⟨š⟩, and ⟨ž⟩.

The reader is expected to gather the interpretation of the word from the context, as in these examples: To compensate for the shortcomings of the standard orthography, Slovene also uses standardized diacritics or accent marks to denote stress, vowel length, and pitch accent, much like the closely related Serbo-Croatian.

It was published in five volumes by Državna Založba Slovenije between 1970 and 1991 and contains more than 100,000 entries and subentries with accentuation, part-of-speech labels, common collocations, and various qualifiers.