Problem identification
By population, Slovenia is the fifth-smallest EU member state; with 0.4% of the total EU population it outranks only Estonia, Cyprus, Luxemburg and Malta. However, considering the percentage of migrants in its population, Slovenia leaves one third of the EU member states behind. In 2006 and 2007, Slovenia’s 2.7% of migrants may not have reached the high of 19% of migrant population in Latvia, but it did surpass the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and Romania. Moreover, the trend is definitely upward: Slovenia’s 127% immigration increase from 2006 to 2007 was second only to the rates for the Czech Republic (141.8%) and Denmark (131.7%) (Vertot 2009, 64-72).
Slovenia had experience with immigration even before joining the EU: from as early as the late 1970s, economic immigrants employed in the construction industry or as seasonal workers arrived from other Yugoslav republics; since 1992, when Slovenia became an independent state, the intensive immigration from former Yugoslav republics has continued. The statistical data thus show that in 2007 the majority of immigrants from non-EU states still came from the republics formerly belonging to Yugoslavia (85.4%), among these, most were from Bosnia and Herzegovina (45.4%), Serbia (including Kosovo) and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Vertot 2009, 64-72). Such immigrants usually do not represent a major linguistic problem, since the majority of the Slovenian population can speak or at least understand Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian (or better, Serbo-Croatian, which functioned as an unofficial lingua franca in the otherwise officially trilingual Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia). However, the Albanians from Kosovo, whose knowledge of Serbian is diminishing, and immigrants from other EU member states represent an increasing problem. In 2007, for example, already every third immigrant from other EU member states came from Bulgaria and every fifth immigrant from Slovakia (ibid., 71) – that is, from linguistic groups that were traditionally not represented in Slovenia and might present a problem for Slovenian speakers. Slovenia, like many other new member states, is thus a country that has had almost no experience with immigration that represented a linguistic challenge, but the dramatic change in the immigration flow and the new linguistic groups of immigrants now demand swift response.
The fact that Slovenia has long stopped being a country of emigration and has become a country of considerable multilingual immigration is not reflected in research or public awareness of the issue.
