Bøger i Thought, Society, Culture serien

In the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, nearly one-third of the population of today¿s Slovenia permanently settled in countries around the world. Many more were traveling back and forth, searching for work to ensure the survival of the family members left behind at home and the prosperity for the families and communities they were creating abroad. From one of the smallest nations in Europe, barely reaching one and a half million inhabitants at the time, people departed in numbers reaching 440,000. This book tells their stories, about the "daring dreams of the future," as the Slovenian poet Oton ¿upanc¿ic¿¿whose words open the book¿so beautifully put it. The people who left took recipes for their foods, accordions for their music, and love for their culture and language, which was, and has remained, a linguistic island between Vienna and Venice. In their new communities, they built homes, churches, and cultural institutions that have survived until today.

This work discusses early-modern collective identities related to territory, language, cultural milieu, state, and alleged "ethnic" origins in the border and multilingual areas of Friuli and the County of Gorizia before the rise of nineteenth-century nationalisms.

This book analyzes the reasons for the emergence and extinction of the Croatian name in four Slovene border regions. The author uses comparative methods and a broad spectrum of sources. He explores how this process was triggered by tectonic geopolitical changes resulting from the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans and the Pannonian Basin.

The author treats the correspondence between the Slavist Jernej Kopitar and the Slovene patron Ziga Zois (composed between 1808-19). First, he situates it in history and within the genre of the letter, especially in regard to Enlightenment epistolography; second, he deals with its importance for the development of Slavic cultural nationalisms.

A sociolinguistic survey of some key issues concerning language use in 16th century Slovenia is followed by a detailed presentation of all linguistic works from this period, which range from Adam Bohoric's pioneering grammar (1584) to isolated notes found in books and manuscripts.