Straddling the imaginary border between the Balkans and Central Europe, Slovenia is home to two million citizens united by a common language. But this wasn’t always the case. For about six hundred years, the Slovene lands were the domain of the Habsburgs, with the occasional appearance by the French, Italians, Hungarians, and Serbs. The Slovene language—and with it the core of Slovene identity—should by all rights have disappeared long ago, subsumed by the much stronger languages and political powers surrounding it. The language survived thanks to the efforts of many…
