The Slovenian Language in Synchronic and Diachronic Development

The research program Slovenski jezik v sinhronem in diahronem razvoju (The Slovenian Language in Synchronic and Diachronic Development) covers the production of basic and specialized lexicographic works and linguistics studies in the following areas: contemporary standard slovenian, slovenian technical terminology, slovenian dialectology, history of slovenian,etymology and onomastics, and language technologies.
The work performed by the program group is basic and of key importance to the development of all disciplines (also) dealing with Slovenian – that is, Slovenian and Slavic studies, and comparative and general linguistics.
The users of all functionally motivated varieties of language express an interest in our lexicological and lexicographic findings; however, from the viewpoint of linguistics, primarily the individuals and institutions in science, culture, and education in Slovenia and abroad use these results for comparative and constructive purposes. Lexicographic works contribute to the faster development of new linguistic disciplines; the necessary lexicological and lexicographic knowledge contributes significantly to the development of linguistic technologies. Lexicography provides a great deal of general linguistic knowledge and enables suitable methodological training. Normative studies contribute to better accessibility of concrete normative solutions and a faster development of language tools, which will help Slovenian users in their everyday work (e.g., spellcheckers and translation programs).
Terminological dictionaries preserve the Slovenian character of individual disciplines and ensure that their terminology develops in Slovenian. Because these disciplines are generally multilingual, they enable international scholarly and professional cooperation, as well as convey Slovenian research achievements to foreign-language environments and vice versa.
Due to the specific location of its ethnic territory, Slovenian dialects are extremely informative within Slavic linguistics and are often a source for explaining the history of many linguistic phenomena. In addition, they are a rich source for etymological, comparative, and contrastive studies of Slavic languages and the entire Indo-European family. In accentology, the preservation of tone in some Slovenian dialects demands special attention; this is an important source for the extremely topical reconstruction of Slavic, Balto-Slavic, and Proto-Indo-European paradigmatic accentology. ¸
The linguistic knowledge provided by etymology and onomastics studies will be applicable in further etymological and onomastic research on Slovenian, as well as other Slavic and Indo-European languages. These research achievements are a source of information for European national comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies in general, regardless of which research center around the world the studies are performed at. In addition, they are a source of information for other specialized linguistic disciplines, such as dialectology, terminology, grammar, and orthography, as well as for non-linguistic disciplines, such as archeology, history, law, and ethnology.
With its informative dimension, provided by full excerpts, and its original presentation methods, the Slovar jezika protestantskih piscev 16. stoletja will serve as a methodological example to other nations.
Within a broader scale, the basic significance of the research results is the preparation of an important part of the basic infrastructure that is urgently required in developing improved scholarly disciplines, such as machine translation, machine comprehension of natural language, and language synthesis and recognition.