THE TEACHERS

According to the 2002 Slovenia census, three years before the Complainant's arrival the mother tongue of a total 1964036 inhabitants included 31329 Serbian, 36265 Serbo-Croatian, 5778 "other" and 52316 unknown.

English is not among the languages listed and could belong to people under either of the last two headings.

The predominant age range among 2002's other-unknowns is 25-50. [9]

These 58094 (2.96%) other-unknowns are a statistic covering all the world's languages so 1 in 33 in Slovenia belonged in this group in 2002. They are the largest group after Slovene speakers themselves.

Of course all we are really lacking in the context of ZJRS 14 is a "doesn't speak Slovene" total, seemingly an insulting type of number and the only statistic which Slovenia cannot bring itself to produce.

Given the iron rule of ZJRS 14 this is the only figure that really matters for discrimination purposes. And so begins a journey into a heavy numerical fog.

Here we see 240,602 (12.25%) did not have Slovene as a mother tongue in 2002. What proportion of these were better at English than Slovene? The stats do not say.

As for the 1723434 Slovene speakers, one of the things it is essential to remind foreigners is that Slovenians from different regions sometimes cannot understand each other, and have around 50 dialects.

Besides some compromises over this, there is an official "proper" Slovene - that no one speaks, whose main purpose seems to be to render official documents as bewildering to the natives as to the foreigner asking them what it means.

By 2020, the 2002 other-unknowns had grown to 11.1%, according to the same data being quoted by Eurydice. Unknowns alone account for 8.9%, it says.

But 52316/1964036 x 100 is not 8.9%, it is 2.66%.

What is the source of this 8.9% figure?

Compared with the Slovenian statistical office original, Eurydice in its demographic [11] has removed all the Romany, Albanian, Montenegrin, Macedonian and German language groups and inserted a new language group: "Muslims (including Bosniacs)".

In Eurydice's 2020 version of 2002 [11], Serbs and Croatians (3.8%) replace the Serbs, Croatians, and Serbo-Croatians of [9] - total 121673, 6.2%.

Lumping together all the Romany, Albanian, Montenegrin, Macedonian and German speakers - who are no longer mentioned in 2020 - with the previously known "unknowns" of Popis 2002 results in a total of only 70277 unknowns, being 3.57% and so also well short of the 8.9% claimed here.

If we add all the Bosnians too it's still only 101,776 (5.2%)

8.9% would be 174799 people in Slovenia in 2002.

The "other" category amounted to 5778 individuals and so 0.29% according to Slovenia in 2002.

Eurydice - Orpheus's wife's name has been proposed to mean "true judgement" or "profound judgement", from the Greek: eur dike [12] - makes it 2.2%, which would have to be 43209 people, including the English-speakers.

Citizenship includes a language test. Eurydice notes:

"The share of inhabitants with Slovenian citizenship slightly decreased in the last decade, from just under 96% in 2011 to 92.1% in December 2020."

If this is paralleled by Slovene ability - and there are few other reasons to avoid citizenship - an additional 1 in 25 people have been legally excluded from economic rights in a third of the lifetime of the country. This hardly justifies the loose use of the word "slightly".

Why? Applying the negative growth of -0.39% per year to the 2002 Slovene speakers [27], even with births at the replacement rate, Slovene would diminish to 500 speakers by the year 4086.



Treating population growth and the percentage with citizenship as mutually exclusive values - migration is a major influence, explains SURS [40] - we add the average population growth for the period 2011-2020 to the projection, which is -0.86 (trickily this is for all language groups and not Slovenophones alone), for a total decline of -1.25%.

With this combined rate of decline Slovenia could reach <500 Slovene speakers by 2650. [10,11,27]




None of which is any foreigner's doing, unless we count the Pope. This combination of lacklustre performances suggests the Slovenians and their languages choose a genetically authentic extinction above survival in statistical form as a mix of mongrels and fake foreign Slovene-speakers.

Even using the raised figure of known unknowns hypothesised above, the origin and fate of the discrepant ((8.9% - 3.57%) x 1964036) - 70277 i.e. 104683 unknowns raised by Eurydice's interpretation of the 2002 figures is unknown. The higher estimate ((8.9% - 2.66%) x 1964036) - 70277 = 122555.

It is hard to reconcile the 12.25% non-Slovene mother tonguers (NSMTs) reported in 2002 with the 16.9% non-Slovene ethnic groups and therefore presumably non-mother tonguers reported about the same year in late 2020.

For whatever reason, Slovenia chooses not to count its Anglophone residents in a single statistic. It might affect their value, e.g. by creating one. Nothing exists in Slovenia until it has been counted.

The United States and United Kingdom provide about a thousand [26]. The Complainant's region Podravska, which includes Slovenia's second largest city Maribor, performed 112 hours of teaching Slovene as a foreign language in 2015. [39]

Over these three years Podravska had 35 courses of which 6 were counted as "over 100 hours".

From 27 July 2018 [43] the Interior Ministry is known to have made public some free Slovene lessons for third-country nationals with €22.60 anywhere with an Upravna Enota. The Complainant believes the ZRSZ paid this fee in the 2021 debacle.

By 2021 Slovenia had 208 persons in employment under occupational group 2353 - other language teachers, and Podravska 32. Four regions had Z.

Z means confidential, i.e. a small positive number that has been suppressed to prevent re-identification through data linkage. The argument runs like this: knowing that Koroška has 2 "other language teachers" seems harmless in isolation. But that figure sits in a table that also breaks down by year, and can be cross-referenced with other Stat.si tables that break the same occupational group down by age band, sex, or employer type. Someone sufficiently motivated — say, a tax authority, or a determined individual — can triangulate across tables and narrow an apparently anonymous aggregate to a specific person.

Slovene language teachers in sparsely served regions therefore have little reason to fear being traced through such intrigue, and will only be found if they advertise.

What can be inferred from the four Zs is that as they contain the 19 missing teachers in the total, and Goriška had 6, the threshold for Slovene teaching secrecy in this case is 5 [41].

These four smaller regions were home to 301,129 people in 2021, representing about 14.3% of Slovenia’s total population. 90% of the teaching force was not in these areas, where these specialist teachers averaged 1 per 15849 residents. We are now ready to compare the quantities of teachers, hours, and pupils.