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| Slovene alphabet | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Script type | |
Time period | early 19th century – present |
| Languages | Slovene |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
Child systems | Slovene national phonetic transcription |
| Unicode | |
| Subset ofLatin (Basic Latin andLatin Extended-A) | |
| This article containsphonetic transcriptions in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. For the distinction between[ ],/ / and ⟨ ⟩, seeIPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
TheSlovene alphabet orSlovenian alphabet (Slovene:slovenska abeceda,pronounced[slɔˈʋèːnskaabɛˈtséːda] orslovenska gajica[-ˈɡáːjitsa]) is an extension of theLatin script used to writeSlovene. The standard language uses aLatin alphabet which is a slight modification of the CroatianGaj's Latin alphabet, consisting of 25 lower- and upper-case letters:
The following Latin letters are also found separately alphabetized in words of non-Slovene origin:Ć (mehki č),Đ (dže),Q (ku),W (dvojni ve),X (iks), andY (ipsilon).
| Letter | Name | IPA | English approx. |
|---|---|---|---|
| A, a | a | /a/ | arm |
| B, b | be | /b/ | bat |
| C, c | ce | /ts/ | cats |
| Č, č | če | /tʃ/ | charge |
| D, d | de | /d/ | day |
| E, e | e | /ɛ/,/e/,/ə/ | bed, sleigh |
| F, f | ef | /f/ | fat |
| G, g | ge | /ɡ/ | gone |
| H, h | ha | /x/ | (Scottish English) loch |
| I, i | i | /i/ | me |
| J, j | je | /j/ | yes |
| K, k | ka | /k/ | cat |
| L, l | el | /l/,/w/ | lid |
| M, m | em | /m/ | month |
| N, n | en | /n/ | nose |
| O, o | o | /ɔ/,/o/ | void, so |
| P, p | pe | /p/ | poke |
| R, r | er | /r/ | (trilled)risk |
| S, s | es | /s/ | sat |
| Š, š | eš | /ʃ/ | shin |
| T, t | te | /t/ | took |
| U, u | u | /u/ | sooth |
| V, v | ve | /v/,/w/ | virus |
| Z, z | ze | /z/ | zoo |
| Ž, ž | že | /ʒ/ | parmesan, vision |
To compensate for the shortcomings of the standard orthography, Slovenian also uses standardizeddiacritics or accent marks to denotestress,vowel length andpitch accent, much like the closely relatedSerbo-Croatian. However, as in Serbo-Croatian, use of such accent marks is restricted to dictionaries, language textbooks and linguistic publications. In normal writing, the diacritics are almost never used, except in a few minimal pairs where real ambiguity could arise.
Two different and mutually incompatible systems of diacritics are used. The first is the simpler non-tonemic system, which can be applied to all Slovene dialects. It is more widely used and is the standard representation in dictionaries such as SSKJ. The tonemic system also includes tone as part of the representation. However, neither system reliably distinguishes schwa/ə/ from the front mid-vowels, nor vocalised l/w/ from regular l/l/. Some sources write these asə andł, respectively, but this is not as common.
In the non-tonemic system, the distinction between the two mid-vowels is indicated, as well as the placement of stress and length of vowels:
The tonemic system uses the diacritics somewhat differently from the non-tonemic system. The high-mid vowels/eː/ and/oː/ are writtenẹ ọ with a subscript dot, while the low-mid vowels/ɛː/ and/ɔː/ are written as plaine o.
Pitch accent and length is indicated by four diacritical marks:
The schwa vowel/ə/ is written ambiguously ase, but its accentuation will sometimes distinguish it: a long vowel mark can never appear on a schwa, while a grave accent can appear only on a schwa. Thus, onlyȅ and unstressede are truly ambiguous.
The writing in its usual form uses additional accentual marks, which are used to disambiguate similar words with different meanings. For example:
There are 5 letters forvowels (a,e,i,o,u) and 20 forconsonants. The lettersq,w,x,y are excluded from the standard spelling, as are someSerbo-Croatian graphemes (ć,đ), however they are collated as independent letters in some encyclopedias and dictionary listings; foreignproper nouns ortoponyms are often not adapted to Slovene orthography as they are in some other Slavic languages, such as partly inRussian or entirely in the Serbian standard of Serbo-Croatian.
In addition, the graphemesö andü are used in certain non-standard dialect spellings (usually representing loanwords from German, Hungarian or Turkish) – for example,dödöli (Prekmurje potato dumplings) andDanilo Türk (a politician).
Encyclopedic listings (such as in the 2001Slovenski pravopis and the 2006Leksikon SOVA) use this alphabet:
Therefore,Newton andNew York remain the same and are not transliterated toNjuton orNjujork; transliterated forms would seem very odd to a Slovene. However, the unit of force is written asnjuton as well asnewton. Some place names are transliterated (e.g. Philadelphia – Filadelfija; Hawaii – Havaji). Other names from non-Latin languages are transliterated in a fashion similar to that used by other European languages, albeit with some adaptations.Japanese,Indonesian andArabic names such asKajibumi,Jakarta andJabar are written asKadžibumi,Džakarta andDžabar, wherej is replaced withdž. Except forć andđ, graphemes withdiacritical marks from other foreign alphabets (e.g.,ä,å,æ,ç,ë,ï,ń,ö,ß,ş,ü) are not used as independent letters.
The modern alphabet (abeceda) was standardised in the mid-1840s from an arrangement of theCroatian national reviver and leaderLjudevit Gaj which would become theCroatian alphabet, and was in turn patterned on theCzech alphabet. Before the current alphabet became standard,š was, for example, written asʃ,ʃʃ orſ;č astʃch,cz,tʃcz ortcz;i sometimes asy as a relic of the letter now rendered asЫ (yery) in modern Russian;j asy;l asll;v asw;ž asʃ,ʃʃ orʃz.
In the old alphabet used by most distinguished writers, theBohorič alphabet (bohoričica), developed byAdam Bohorič, the charactersč,š andž would be spelt aszh,ſh andsh respectively, andc,s andz would be spelt asz,ſ ands respectively. To remedy this, so that there was a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters,Jernej Kopitar urged the development of a new alphabet.
In 1825,Franc Serafin Metelko proposed his version of the alphabet (theMetelko alphabet,metelčica). However, it was banned in 1833 in favour of the Bohorič alphabet after the so-called "Suit of the Letters" (Črkarska pravda) (1830–1833), which was won byFrance Prešeren andMatija Čop. Another alphabet, theDajnko alphabet (dajnčica), was developed byPeter Dajnko in 1824, but did not catch on as widely as the Metelko alphabet; it was banned in 1838 because it mixed Latin and Cyrillic characters, which was seen as a poor way to handle missing characters.
Gaj's Latin alphabet (gajica) was adopted afterwards, although it still fails to distinguish all the phonemes of Slovene.
The preferredcharacter encodings (writing codes) for Slovene texts areUTF-8 (Unicode),UTF-16, andISO/IEC 8859-2 (Latin-2), which generally supports Central and Eastern European languages that are written in theLatin script.
In the originalASCII frame of 1 to 126 characters one can find these examples of writing text in Slovene:
InISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1) typical workarounds for missing characters Č (č), Š (š), and Ž (ž) can be C~ (c~), S~ (s~), Z~ (z~) or similar as for ASCII encoding.
For usage underDOS andMicrosoft Windows alsocode pages 852 andWindows-1250 respectively fully supported Slovene alphabet.
InTeX notation,č,š andž become\v c,\v s,\v z,\v{c},\v{s},\v{z} or in their macro versions,"c,"s and"z, or in other representations as\~,\{,\' for lowercase and\^,\[,\@ for uppercase.
TheIETF language tags have assigned variants to the different orthographies of Slovene:[1]
sl-bohoric (Bohoric alphabet)sl-dajnko (Dajnko alphabet)sl-metelko (Metelko alphabet)sl-rozaj-1994 (Standardized Resian orthography).