ABSTRACT
The language pair of German-Slovenian is, on what Pierre Bourdieu (1990) called the language market, a very unequal one. German is spoken as a first language by approximately 90 million speakers and benefits from a high status (Glück, 2000). Slovenian, on the other hand, is spoken by a comparatively small language community of approximately 2.4 million in Europe, and only became an official state language when Slovenia declared independence in 1991. In addition to use in Slovenia, Slovenian is also spoken by Slovenian minorities in Italy, Hungary and Austria. Today in Austria, Slovenian has the status of an officially recognised minority language, but the use of Slovenian is restricted to very few domains. In public, language use is regulated by a complicated mosaic of laws and regulations which makes it difficult to know actually where and when Slovenian can be spoken. In some municipalities, it is an official language in administrative procedures; in others, only in court or with police officials. In some there are topographic signs in Slovenian, in others not. However, access to bilingual education on a primary level is now granted throughout the entire bilingual German-Slovenian-speaking region in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia.
