Various key roles of older Slovene manuscripts in the history of language are considered. Medieval manuscripts enable the reconstruction and dating of linguistic phenomena. From the year 1550 onwards, these manuscripts with their varied genre and individualized, double literary and dialectal or supra-dialectal, provincial distinguishing linguistic character (non-uniformly written, with vocal-formative and lexical variations) complement the printed, and in comparison with them demonstrate changes at all language levels, while in the degree of standardization, they reflect spoken/dialectal and foreign language elements, preserve archaisms and older (intertextual) layers, and document the use of Slovene in different social groups.
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