THE COMPETITION

Slovenia's English is strong vocally, but Slovenia's English promotional texts often fall short of their mark. Tourism advertising often ranges between the comedically anodyne and the outright unreadable.

For Anglophones, written Slovene allows you to go at your own pace.

Consequently the two groups have opposing strengths and weaknesses, one is good at speaking, but less confident at English spelling and vernacular text. The Anglophones can read Slovene and eventually hash up a sentence with help from Google, but dare not utter a word.

None of this seems to qualify or support a prohibition on English language business in Slovenia. But for legal reasons fixing the locals' Slovenglish has to be done by a Slovenian, or on the black market (sometimes both). [80]

Slovenia's manouevres to maintain the professional exclusion of native speakers in pedagogy and business has led to many hilarious and expensive results! [13]

Were that Slovenia had been left with a 17.3% Serbo-Croat speaking population - the number identifying as ethnic Russians in the 2001 Ukrainian census - would their situation be any different today? [14]

Ukraine is now "West" of Slovenia.

At first glance it does not appear that Slovenia has a large minority language, baked into the education system, and upon which its fortunes often turn, as with Russian in (parts of) Ukraine.

But in numbers, English is Slovenia's Russian equivalent three times over.

They invaded themselves threefold as much.