Sound system

Vowels
Slovenian has 8 vowel phonemes: /i/, /e/, //, /a/, , /u/, /o/, //. All vowels except schwa can be long or short. Stressed vowels can be long or short, but long vowels are always stressed.

Consonants
Slovenian has 21 consonant phonemes. They are listed below:

All voiced stops, fricatives and affricates are devoiced at the end of words, e.g., slab "weak" is pronounced as /slap/.

Stress
Like Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, Slovenian has a pitch accent. Long vowels can be either falling or rising, short vowels are typically falling.

Click here to listen to some common phrases in Slovenian

Slovenian is a richly inflected language with a grammar that is similar to that of other Slavic languages.

Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns
Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns are inflected for the following categories.

• Three numbers (singular, plural, and dual). Slovene has a dual number which has all but disappeared in the other Slavic languages, e.g., 1 mesto (singular) "place," 2 mesti (dual), 3-4 mesta (plural).
• Six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional).
• Three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter).
• Definiteness (only in adjectives).
• Demonstratives have three distinctions, roughly equivalent to this, that, and yonder.

Verbs
Slovenian verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. They are marked for the following categories:

• three persons (first, second, third);
• three numbers (singular, dual, and plural);
• three tenses (simple present, compound past and future);
• two aspects (imperfective and perfective);
• three moods (indicative, imperative, conditional);
• three voices (active, middle, and passive).

Slovenian aspect involves grammar, lexicon, semantics, and pragmatics. Perfective verbs are formed by prefixation. The system is complex enough to have occupied generations of linguists and frustrated generations of learners.

Verbs of motion constitute a special subcategory of Bosnian verbs. They are characterized by a complex system of directional and aspectual prefixes and suffixes..

Word order
The neutral word order in Slovenian is Subject-Object-Verb.However, other orders are possible. Inflectional endings take care of keeping clear grammatical relations and roles in the sentence. Word order is principally determined by topic (what the sentence is about, or old information) and focus (new information). Constituents with old information precede constituents with new information, or those that carry the most emphasis.