Varieties of Spoken Slovenian in Austrian Carinthia and the Speech Practices of Young Members of the Minority

Abstract

In bilingual Austrian Carinthia, visible changes have taken place in recent decades; for example, applications for bilingual programs have increased, and the Slovenian ethnic community includes residents in areas where it previously did not have any declared members. On the other hand, the number of individuals primarily linguistically socialized in the dialect is decreasing, and new varieties of spoken Slovenian are appearing (e.g., the Slovenian of immigrants from other former Yugoslav republics and the Slovenian of immigrants from Slovenia, as well as the Slovenian of German speakers learning Slovenian at school and in language courses). In addition to general research findings, insight into (linguistic) life and experiencing changes at the individual level is also important. This article presents the results of biographical interviews conducted with seven students of Slovenian at the University of Klagenfurt. Three topics are at the forefront: the attitude toward the local dialect, the use of standard Slovenian variety, and speech accommodation in groups. At the dialect level, the linguistic character of Carinthia is changing under the influence of various processes, including migration within the region, socioeconomic and educational changes within the minority, and immigration from Slovenia. There are increasingly more families in which parents
with children consciously use the standard language variety. Research and interviews confirm that a person’s dialect also appears to be a strong identifying and emotional factor among young members of the minority. Two respondents, who knew only the standard language variety from home, learned the dialects later, especially from their peers. This enabled them to overcome a possible barrier between themselves and others, which is reported by some speakers that were not primarily linguistically socialized into a dialect. Other respondents encountered standard Slovenian in preschool or school, and today they personally rely on it, especially in conversations with speakers of more distant Carinthian or Slovenian dialects. In the interviews, they confirmed the hypothesis about the special features of the Carinthian standard variety, as they know it especially from the minority media. They observe differences at the phonetic level and to some extent in the lexicon, but they do not consider them large. The respondents did not directly confirm the existence of a common regional colloquial
variety. However, during secondary education at the latest, they developed the ability to accommodate to speakers of other Carinthian dialects, which is conditioned by their more developed language ability in Slovenian. Today, when talking to speakers of a different dialect, they generally do not switch to German.