Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/25

 more correct to treat all the Slav dialects that are spoken from the Alps to the Balkans as one group, and to call that the Serbo-Croatian-Slovenish group. Slovenish is the language spoken by about one and a half million Slavs, who inhabit the southern parts of the Austrian provinces of Styria and Carinthia, the whole of Carniola, or Krain (a name, common to all Slavonic languages, which merely means 'The Borderland'), and the northern part of Istria. The centre of their national activity is the town known in German as Laibach and in Slovenish as Ljubljana, the capital of Carniola, but the Slovenes form at least 20 per cent, of the population of Trieste, and take a growing interest in the direction of the affairs of that busy city. The Slovenes are the only one of the Slav peoples who have conserved as the appellation of themselves the name Slovene, by which, par excellence, the Slavs in early times designated all of their own race, implied their mutual intelligibility, and distinguished themselves from their ubiquitous German neighbours, whom they have always termed Nemtsi, the dumb folk. The frequency of the term Slovene in one form or another as a designation of Slavonic peoples for each other or for their race as a whole is most confusing. Thus, for instance, in Servian and Slovenish the word for Slovenish and Slavonic is identical, viz. 'Slovenski,' while it has been pointed out that the Slovaks in Northern Hungary call their own language Slovensky and their country Slovensko. In earlier times the Slovenes were known as Chorutane, and are thus mentioned in the early Russian chronicles and by the Čech chronicler Dalimil; this name Chorutane, which is now obsolete, was derived from that part of the country inhabited by the Slovenes, Carantanum, or Goratan, and survives still in the geographical term Carinthia or Kärnten. The Germans of Carinthia and Styria usually specify the Slovenes as Winden or Wenden; this has always been the generic term applied indiscriminately to all Slavs by Germans, but is now limited in its application to the Slovenes of Austria, and, as