THE PUPILS
If Slovenia has 2,086,214 residents, 16.9% of them - 352,570 - do not
have Slovene as their mother tongue.
Of these, 93% are actual immigrants or foreign-origin residents.
Of that group, 54% are realistic potential customers for Slovenian
language courses.
54% of 93% of 16.9% of 2,086,214 = 176,869 pupils. What about the
remaining 46%? The other 46% are excluded because they are unlikely to
enroll in Slovene courses: they already speak Slovene well enough, very
young children or elderly immigrants, are those who plan to stay only
temporarily, or who rely entirely on English or another language for
their needs.
In short: Out of all non-Slovene mother tongue residents, roughly half
are seen as realistic future students for language courses.
Recall, the ZRSZ subscribed to the idea of a 180 hour Level A1 course.
Locally, there were 2484 teaching hours in all 2013-2015, and this is less than 16 hours per week.
In 2015 Podravska it was 2 hours and 9 minutes per week. These quantities are for all the pupils, remember.
Certain class sizes do not suit the Slovenian ethos, as the idea of modern types of foreigner cooperating "secretly" (i.e. not in Slovene) to succeed in anything at all creates suspicion and nervousness. [80]
Using:
- the 2021 official national teacher total: 208
- the 2013-2015 regional total of hours performed: 15959
- the conservative estimate of 176869 potential pupils waiting to join the economy as of June 2022
...each 2021 teacher has 850 potential 2022 pupils.
...each 2013-15 teacher averaged 15959 hours/1095.75 days*7/208 = 0.49 hours per week.
...each of 2013-15's potential pupils could have expected 15959/208/1095.75*7*60*60/176869 = 2.075119042791366 seconds of individual attention per week.
208 teachers teaching the 176869 pupils 8 hours a day in any order
would take 52.4 years. So there would be no point starting in your
30s.
The ideal class size from the perspective of the teacher of Slovene is more than one, but less than outnumber you.
Anything that might bring aliens together, except as tourists, will
be deemed culturally inappropriate. The calculation therefore assumes
1:1 teaching.
Usually, Slovenians obtain more efficient suction by splitting their free foreigners up: each one can then talk simultaneously, and to fewer people. [80]
But in this case there just aren't enough teachers who want to charge NSMTs for Slovene lessons so they can practice their English, and it would take a hundred times more of them to do it a hundred times faster.
A MORE REFINED APPROACH
By 2021 the Statistical Office was saying:
"...among 169,000 foreigners in 2021, there were just under 7% who
were actually born in Slovenia and were statistically not considered
immigrants." [40]
Moreover:
"Among the 2,108,977 residents of Slovenia as of 1 January 2021,
292,824 or 13.9% were born abroad. That means that they immigrated to
Slovenia at some point. Among them, 46% were citizens of Slovenia:
some of these were born as such (for example they were born to
Slovenian citizens who lived abroad), while some acquired Slovenian
citizenship through naturalisation." [40]
Neither of these guarantee any experience of Slovene, so ignoring this
46% and this 7% in the calculation could significantly underestimate
the potential NSMT population.
How many - if any - of the remaining 158125 (54%) immigrants include
Slovenian speakers is still impossible to determine, and hence also
the contrary. Most of those depending on English are in there
somewhere.
Even since 2002 the statisticians have never really gained full focus
on this uncomfortable topic. The statistics dance around the English
quantity but never confront it head on.
Reporting in December 2017 - with a diagram - the news that two out of
three who immigrated to Slovenia in 2008-9 were still there, the stats
reveal that:
"2,600 (5%) foreigners acquired citizenship, 85% of them are still
living in Slovenia. So citizenship of the host country is the factor
with negative influence on further international mobility."
What? The statistics on offer are something of a jumble sale. But as
the period of this particular statistical enthusiasm includes that
for which teaching hours data are available we can compare
Slovenia's 2008/9 immigrants with the 15959 hours performed in
2013-2015, by which time the survivors must surely have been ready
for their citizenship, and see that makes 5320 hours per year on
average, just over 100 hours of teaching time a week for all the
immigrants.
Of course 2008/9 was not the only year there was immigration to
Slovenia. Those who left or died were replaced and more.
37514 (70%) of the 2008/9 intake had not left or died by 2015
[40].
Annual teaching hours available to the 2600 new citizens among the
arrivals of 2008/9 are therefore estimated at 5320/2600 = 2.05 hours
per pupil per year.
Taking the 2008/9 arrivals left by 2015 as a whole, 5320/37514 is
0.142 hours per pupil per year, which is eight and a half
minutes.
Whereas looking at the whole 100% (of the 54%) present in 2021,
5320/158125 gives a result of 0.034 hours taught per conservatively
estimated NSMT, which is about two minutes per year.
And indeed this is pretty much the maximum amount of time 99% of
Slovenians do spend discussing their language, not counting the
hours they waste on urging you to do it, telling you you can't do
it, telling each other you refuse to do it, and dvojina.
A fundamental aspect of this "urging" is that you learn it somewhere
else. [80]
The 83.1% version [11] obviously implies what Eurydice says, that there were 16.9% NSMTs
- including the unknowns - amounting to up to 1 in 6 in Slovenia
channeled into the Uiberreither zone, and the concomitant
potentially illegal activity of trying to stay alive without
speaking Slovene.***
Thus the ZJRS delivers a legally vulnerable cohort of helpless
non-belongers, a philosophy identical in its effect to
Uiberreither's.
The ZJRS criminalises the foreign-sounding victims of its own
inefficacy, who can be penalised at the whim of any indigenous
pedant.
We could take 7% [40] off that 16.9% and it would still be 15.7%. "People live here for
decades without learning Slovene," is a popular refrain, delivered in
a tone somewhere between pride, resignation and resentment,
perpetuating a popular fundamental attribution error, found all over
the place.
Slovenians surprised and offended about this have no difficulty also
being surprised and offended at any suggestion they are something to
do with it.
Loyalties are flexible. English can be both worshipped and dismissed,
depending on whether you are wearing your sophisticated cosmopolitan
hat or your peasant conformity hat.
Often dependent upon whether others are observing them in the throes
of Anglophilia, they do not seem to know whether to grovel or get
aggressive with the English incursion, and the answer is neither.
[80]
BLACK TO THE FUTURE
"The population of Slovenia increased by 13,116 in 2020. The number
of citizens of Slovenia increased by just over 800, while the number
of foreign citizens increased by 12,300. The share of foreign citizens
in the population was 8.0% on 1 January 2021." says SURS. [99]
But this shows the futility of first conflating births and
immigration, and then ignoring the emigration rates of mother tonguers
as a component of the demography. This "separate story" belongs on a
different page:
"In 2020, every week 111 Slovenian citizens and 228 foreigners
emigrated from Slovenia
"In 2020, more than 36,100 people immigrated to Slovenia, while more
than 17,700 emigrated. Positive net migration was partly due to
administrative changes in the population register." [104]
A moment's non-Slovenianness will reveal to you that this last
statement is untrue. Nobody's fact of arriving or leaving was altered
by these mysterious changes in ways of counting.
So instead of trying to make the number smaller by using weeks instead
of years, 5772 mother tonguers left in 2020.
This politicised way of presenting it might suit, for instance, a
number-cruncher whose job is to alert the nation about swarms of NSMTs
who can't work legally, but is simultaneously duty-bound to play down
any statistics about Slovenians leaving, to avoid encouraging a
stampede involving such aspirations, mostly in the young, and the
language death which would result.
Putting it together, 32.7% of those emigrating (or deregistering) are
mother tonguers. Arrivals, who cannot deal with business clients due
to not being ZJRS-14-compliant, are 93.7% NMSTs.
Slovenians do not, of course, go abroad to start Slovene-speaking
ghettos as there are not enough of them, and certainly not enough on
the same side.
Then there is SURS' other page, which states:
"In 2020, 18,767 children were born in Slovenia."
and
"Fertility below the population replacement level is characteristic
for Slovenia. The total fertility rate in 2020 was 1.60." [103]
How do the 18767 births fit in with the 2020 population rise of
13116?
Are we to conclude by juxtaposing these items of information that
18767 minus "just over" 800 - in other terms 95.7% of the babies -
were not citizens of Slovenia but the partly or wholly NSMT progeny of
the 12300 non-citizen incomers and their predecessors from earlier
years?
We hope Slovenia does not have a 30% infant mortality rate. So, did
5651 babies immediately leave the country before being registered as
Slovenian?
Slovenia's arithmetical blancmange wobbles on, as SURS continues
meandering carefully around anything which might produce a precise
quantification of NSMTs with "57% of children born to unmarried
mothers" and "13% mothers with foreign citizenship". [103]
It is concluded that between 1 in 33 [9] and 1 in 6 [11] either do not or would prefer not to speak Slovene. At least 1 baby
in 7.69 is being born into ZJRS-based economic apartheid [103]. At least, because some have NSMT fathers too.
In 2022's NPZ (National Knowledge Test) the average in Slovene was 45.5%, and 63.5% in English. This proves the exams are too difficult, say the teachers. [59]
*Eurydice moved quickly to solve the problem, disappearing this
page sometime between the appearance of this voy.si page - first archived on 23 June 2022 - and 27 July, which is why I
organised all the pages referred to here to be archived. As you can
still see, Eurydice also claimed, somewhat contrary to its 83.1%
figure, that Slovene is the mother tongue of 88% of Slovenia's
residents.