How we seek to contribute to the preservation of the Slovene language

Trojina – Institute for Applied Slovene Studies was founded in 2004, with the primary objectives of promoting contemporary, goal-oriented linguistic research, and advocating less rigid attitudes towards the issue of public and private uses of Slovene. The Institute’s activities are based on the assumption that as Slovene speakers we can contribute most effectively to the development of the Slovene language by nurturing our own linguistic competence and responsibility.

The future of Slovene is guaranteed by competent speakers with good access to high quality, user-friendly language resources. It is necessary firstly to create optimal conditions for the creative self-realization of each and every individual in his or her mother tongue and, secondly, to ensure the excellent exchange of information between languages. We feel that it is possible to achieve these goals by investing in modern, well-designed reference books, particularly monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, but also in other language resources for Slovene. Globalization processes and the advancement of new technologies (digitalization, unlimited content exchange, the Internet, etc.) have made it indispensable for every language to be serviced by state-of-the-art computational language resources and tools. These resources and tools are currently being developed for the Slovene language.

Our endeavours are aimed at enhancing the field of Applied Slovene Studies and developing linguistic description based on the analysis of authentic texts and suited to the needs of the average language user. Trojina is currently participating in the European project ‘Communication in Slovene’ (2008–2013), which includes a module entitled ‘Reference Corpus of Slovene and Slovene Lexical Database, with Grammatical Annotation Tool’. With Trojina’s contribution, only a few years from now an extensive lexical database will have been built and all of the related language tools will have been developed, thus fulfilling the conditions for a contemporary lexical description of the Slovene language.