Yearbook 2008
Slovenia. During the first six months of the year, Slovenia was first among the EU’s new members in Eastern Europe to hold the presidency. The government’s main concern was the continued rapprochement between the EU and the Western Balkan countries.
The September parliamentary elections led to Slovenia again being left-wing, after four years with a Conservative-led government. The Social Democratic SD got just over 30 percent of the vote, compared to just over 29 percent for Prime Minister Janez Janša’s party of the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS). The left’s cooperation parties also went ahead at the expense of those who were members of Janša’s coalition government. In November, SD leader Borut Pahor was named new prime minister; he was supported by all parties in Parliament except SDS. Before the election, Pahor had promised to cut public spending to try to keep inflation in check. Slovenia has the highest growth among euro area countries, but also the highest inflation.
- ABBREVIATIONFINDER: Click to see the meanings of 2-letter acronym and abbreviation of SI in general and in geography as Slovenia in particular.
Country data
Area: 20,273 km2 (world ranking: 151)
Residents: 2,067,000
Population density: 102 per km2 (as of 2017, world ranking: 145)
Capital: Ljubljana (Ljubljana)
Official languages: Slovenian
Gross domestic product: 43.3 billion euros; Real growth: 5.0%
Gross national product (GNP, per resident and year): US $ 22,000
Currency: 1 Euro (Euro) = 100 cents
Embassy
Hausvogteiplatz 3
4, 10117 Berlin
Telephone 030 2061450,
Fax 030 20614570
www.berlin.veleposlanistvo.si
Government
Head of State: Borut Pahor, Head of Government: Miroslav “Miro” Cerar, Exterior: Karl Erjavec
National holiday: 25.6.
Administrative structure
212 municipalities, of which 11 municipalities
State and form of government
Constitution of 1991
Republic
Parliament: State assembly (Drzavni zbor) with 90 members (88 elected, 1 representative each of the Hungarian and Italian minorities), election every 4 years; State Council (Drzavni svet) with 40 members, election every 5 years
Direct election of the head of state every 5 years (one-time re-election)
Suffrage from 18 years, employed persons from 16 years
Population: Slovenes, last census 2011: 2,050,189 residents 83, 1% Slovenes, 2.0% Serbs, 1.8% Croats, 1.1% Bosniaks, 0.3% Hungarians, 0.3% Albanians, etc. Proportion of foreigners 2017: 5.5%
Cities (with population): (As of 2017) Ljubljana (Laibach) 280,310 inh., Maribor (Marburg) 94,876, Celje (Cilli) 38,079, Kranj (Krainburg) 37,553, Koper (Capodistria) 25,319
Religions: 58% Catholics, 2% Muslims, 2% Orthodox and others; 10% without religion, 16% n / a (as of 2006)
Languages: 87.7% Slovenian; Recognized minority languages: Hungarian, Italian, German, Serbian, Croatian, Romani
Employees by economic sector:
agriculture. 5%, industry 33%, business 62% (2017)
Unemployment (in% of all labor force): 2017: 6.6%
Inflation rate (in%): 2017: 1.6%
Foreign trade: import: 36.0 billion euros (2017); Export: 38.4 billion euros (2017)
Climate
The climate is slightly continental. The precipitation is 1,300mm per year, the mean January temperatures depending on the region from -2 to + 2 ° C, the July temperatures averaging 21 ° C.
Population 2008
According to Countryaah reports, the population of Slovenia in 2008 was 2,043,226, ranking number 145 in the world. The population growth rate was 0.480% yearly, and the population density was 101.4566 people per km2.
Language
– Slovenian is the westernmost group of Southern Slavic languages. It is spoken in Carniola, in Lower Styria, in Oltremur, in southern Carinthia, in the Val di Resia, and in the eastern part of the Julian Territory. As a consequence of the alpine nature of the Slovenes’ immigration territory and the long submission to different states and different religious centers, Slovenian is divided into a very large number of dialects, even though the occupied country is not very extensive nor is the population very numerous. Furthermore, the areas of the single facts are of different extension and starting from the most different points, so that a determination of dialectal groups and single dialects here, even more than in other territories, must be understood with a certain approximation. There are as many groups as there are regions indicated above.
– The Carniola group, with the capital Ljubljana, which is among the most homogeneous, gave the literary language to the Slovenes.
– When the Slovenes immigrated to the Alpine territory they spoke a language that was still not very different from the Southern Preslav. It can be deduced from the phonetic form taken by local names of the Roman age or from other Latin loanwords: that is, these words underwent the same alteration as the indigenous Slavic words of equal phonetic: for example, to Sontius, Carantia today correspond So è a, Koro š ko ; in Carnia, Kranj ; in Aquileia, Oglej and so on.
– The fundamental alterations of what became the literary language and common to many of the dialects, are, according to F. Ramovš: I. phonetic changes: 1. ǫ and ę in or and and wide; 2. aje, oje, oja in ā, ē, ā ; 3. t ′, d ′ in č, j ; 4. zd ′ in ž ; 5. r ′ dav. to voc. in rj ; in individual cases, ž between voc. in r ; 6. l dav. to cons. and the final in u̯ and l voc. in or u̯ ; 7. the accent type zvêzdà in zvézda ; 8. the formation of new long ones under the original short circumflex (mêd, bôg, bôga, č âst); 9. the displacement of the circumflex on the following (bogâ); 10. the prolongation of the old and new short acute in the penultimate syllable (bra ??? t – bráta); 11. in relation to this the passage of is in ê (and broad), of ò in ó and ó ??? (Or off) and ə in á (n. Plur. R ê bra, Okná, vó ??? lja, ž Anjem ; 12. influences on the amount of voice quality: in the long syllables dominates the narrow vowel (and with the length, in relation to the diphthongization of vowels of type e and o) and in the short ones the tendency to wide vowels (in dial.: e in a, o in a, i in e, u in o); and the reduction of quantity leads to the narrowing of the vowel (o, e in u, i) or to an evanescent vowel (i, e, u in ə etc.). II. Morphological facts: 1. the loss of the vocative; 2. the analogical extension of the themes in – u to the themes in – o ; 3. the loss of the imperf. and aor.; 4. m of first sing. in all verbs. III. Lexical and syntactic peculiarities: great influence of German and neo-Latin on the lexicon; great influence of German on syntax; kaj? , pron. interr. neutral.
– Notable general archaisms are the conservation of the dual, the conservation of the supine and the form of the nom. sg. in kri. – Among the best conservative dialects are the northerners and westerners, since the innovations of the southerners have stopped in the Julian Alps and the Karavanke. This archaicity is revealed in these facts: conservation of dl and vy ; frequent preservation of preslavic ossitonesis; partial preservation of the nasality of ę ǫ preslavi (the denasalization, where it meets, is recent; the reflexes of ę ǫ are here wide vowels); the modern vowel reduction occurs here in its early beginnings; the conservation of ł a, c, z, s dav. at desin. in i and ê ; sporadic conservation of the aor., of the imperfect and of the auxiliary verb for the conditional; lexical archaisms. But these and other facts do not serve to determine dialectal boundaries because they have different areas.
– The dialect of Bela Krajina is a hybrid dialect of Slovenian and Ciacavic, because in the century XVI here on Slovenian territory there was a strong immigration of Croats who fled before the Turks.
– The oldest documents of the dialect, those of Freising, of the century. X or XI, do not yet show traces of dialectal varieties; but documents of 400-500 years later already present fully formed dialects of the type of today.