The official language in Slovenia is Slovenian, as determined by the country’s Constitution, which also guarantees the Italian and Hungarian minorities the right to use their respective languages and develop their cultures in the areas in which they live.

Although Slovenian is part of the South Slavic language group, it also shares many features with the West Slavic branch. Slovenian has been also influenced by the Roman, Germanic and Finno-Ugric worlds. 

About 2.4 million people around the world speak Slovenian as their mother tongue. It is a special language: the most notable is the use of dual form, the grammatical number used for two people or things in all the inflected parts of speech, which is nowadays a very rare phenomenon in linguistics. Despite the relatively small area in which Slovenian is spoken and the language’s small number of speakers, linguists have identified forty-six clearly established dialects.