Slovenia is small yet incredibly diverse country located in the southern Central Europe. It has everything you need for a perfect holiday, from the Alps to the Adriatic and a capital famous for its dragons. Besides it is all reachable within a few hours drive. And while a lot of the inhabitants speak English well, you could still try and learn Slovene. Here are some great facts that will make you consider it:
Language perfect for the spies
Slovenian is spoken by roughly 2.4 million people and most of them live in Slovenia. It makes it almost ideal for a code language. If you steer far from Europe, chances you would be understood are pretty slim. Frankly just a few hours' drive gets you out of the country and probably not even our neighbors such as Austria, Italy or Hungary will know what we are saying.
It might be easier than Russian
Slovenian is a South Slavic language, closely related to Croatian and Serbian and similar to those spoken in Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. And since we are not using Cyrillic, it will be much easier to learn than Russian.
So diverse
It is said to be the most diverse Slavic language in terms of dialects. There are approximately 46 of them. So once you crack the official language, make sure you don't venture too far out of the capital of Ljubljana, as even the rest of Slovenes have trouble understanding people in regions such as Prekmurje.
Multilingual when you are angry
Slovenes have very innocent and mostly quite funny swear words. For example: Tristo kosmatih medvedov! (Three hundred hairy bears!) That doesn't sound like I am being serious, does it. So, when really upset, we usually borrow the swear words from other languages - Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. We were all once a republic of Yugoslavia and it seems these are a few remnants of those times. Anyway if you learn Slovene, you will be able to go to multilingual in seconds.
The most romantic language
Forget French or Italian. Slovenian has the word love in its very name and it's also one of the few languages that in addition to singular and plural also has dual. This makes it perfect for lovers and it's very precise, as in Slovene there is nothing vague about how many of you are going to dinner.
Very polite
Just imagine how much more polite the British could be if they spoke Slovenian, as we have a chance to use two forms of 'you' for formal and informal situations. You can just picture the confusion with all of these yous and when to use which one.
The post was previously published on our blog coolkidzcooltrips.com.