Where Slovenian is spoken
Slovenian is spoken in 5 countries: Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Croatia and 1 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Slovenia | 87% | 1,825,164 |
| Italy | 0.2% | 103,640 |
| Austria | 0.4% | 33,182 |
| Croatia | Not given | Not given |
| Hungary | Not given | Not given |
Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.
On the map, Slovenian is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Slovenian.
How many people speak Slovenian?
Wikidata gives about 2.4 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.
Where Slovenian sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Slovenian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Indo-European
- Classical Indo-European
- Balto-Slavic
- Slavic
- South Slavic
- Western South Slavic
- Slovenian
Related languages
Other languages in the Western South Slavic group:
- Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian (19 million speakers)
- Kajkavian
- Slavomolisano
More about Slovenian
- Read about Slovenian on Wikipedia
- Indo-European languages map
- Languages spoken in Slovenia
- All languages, A to Z
Codes: ISO 639-3 slv, Glottolog slov1268. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.
Questions about Slovenian
Where is Slovenian spoken?
Slovenian is spoken in Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Croatia and 1 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 87% of the population of Slovenia, which is about 1,825,164 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Slovenian?
Wikidata gives about 2.4 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.
Which language family is Slovenian in?
Glottolog places Slovenian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic, South Slavic and Western South Slavic.