Multilingualism | Sloveniš.Nemschko

Sloveniš.Nemschko

For over a thousand years now, Carinthia has been a bilingual country. In 1900, one in four Carinthians spoke Slovenian on a daily basis. In the Carinthian Regional Constitution of 2017, this fact has also been taken into account. In 2011, the National Council decided that bilingual place-name signs should be erected in 164 Carinthian localities. They rendered bilinguality visible in the public space.

Nowadays, Carinthia is home to a winner of the Bachmann Prize, a bishop, a director of the Burgtheater, a winner of the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature and a Nobel laureate who all have one thing in common: they have Slovenian as their mother tongue. It is time to approach this language, and the best way to do so is with a language course from UNIKUM, recorded by Emil Krištof, Zara and Karen Asatrian. “Zdravo! Seit wann?” is the introductory question. The phonetic transcription becomes more similar to the dialects than to the written language; as a result, Doma [dᴐ’ma] means Daheim [da’ham].

If you want to know what makes a Slovenian a Slovenian, you may want to watch the film clips from Stefan Hafner's "F.A.Q. – Frequently Asked Questions. In an effortless and humorous way, he sharpens our view of that which we believe we already know, and surprises us with absolute novelties. The poet Jani Oswald has composed a "Bilingual Poem" exclusively for the exhibition. Using VR goggles, visitors can move the text blocks around at will and in this way create novel texts.