Use of dual in standard Slovene, colloquial Slovene and Slovene dialects

Abstract

The dual is a grammatical expression of number in some languages (e.g. Slovene, Sorbian or Modern Standard Arabic) that denotes two persons or objects. In modern Indo-European languages, the dual is an archaism and one that has been preserved only in a small number of Slavonic languages: in Slovene, Upper and Lower Sorbian and Cassubian; in other Indo-European languages the dual has been replaced by the plural. This paper will present this specific grammatical category as preserved to the present day in Standard Slovene, Colloquial Slovene and various Slovene dialects, and enable more precise comparisons and contrasts to be drawn with the dual in all three forms of the Slovene language.