The master's thesis titled "The use of dialects in Ljubljana kindergartens" consists of theoretical and empirical parts.
In the theoretical section, I first described children's speech and defined the pre-linguistic and linguistic phases in detail. Subsequently, I presented the promotion of speech development, initially focusing on the family, then on the kindergarten. I addressed the area of language in the kindergarten curriculum and continued with social varieties of language. I detailed literary and non-literary language extensively. In the chapter on the social roles of the Slovenian language, I defined native, second, foreign, national, and official languages. In the last part of the theoretical section, I presented dialects in the Republic of Slovenia, compared Slovenian standard language with Slovenian dialects, and concluded the theoretical part with a chapter on the use of dialects in kindergarten.
In the empirical section, the findings of the research are presented, which aimed to determine whether the topic of dialects is represented in Ljubljana kindergartens, where urban speech otherwise predominates. Based on the responses received, I designed five prepared activities on the topic of dialects in kindergarten and also implemented them. Through surveys and conducted activities, I found that activities involving dialects are very interesting to children, although educators' opinions on including dialects in activities vary greatly. More than half of the surveyed educators had already introduced dialects to the children, through listening to stories and songs in dialects and by a person narrating in dialect. The dialects that are most popular among educators are the »Dolenjska« and »Primorska« dialects. These are the dialects that the respondents are most familiar with or originate from.
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