Slovene or Slovenian (language) (= slovenski jezik, slovenščina) is one of the South-Slavic languages.

It is spoken by approximately 2 million speakers worldwide, most of whom live in Slovenia. It is one of the few languages to have preserved the dual grammatical number from Indo-European.

The alphabet (abeceda) was derived in the mid 1840s from an arrangement of the Croatian national reviver and leader Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872) for the Croatian language (alphabet called gajica or Croatian gajica, patterned on the Czech pattern of the 1830s).

There are 5 letters for vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and 20 for consonants.