Even today, the diversity of Slovene dialects is easily recognised by both lay people and experts. Alongside greatly altered social and political conditions, both the importance and the role of the Slovene language as a whole and the meaning and role of its varieties are also changing. The article offers a number of the author’s thoughts on why dialect has in the last two decades, in areas where Slovene is spoken, increasingly taken on roles normally reserved for the standard language. The author emphasises three reasons for this: 1) the individualisation of society, alongside globalisation; 2) the increasing distance of the standard language from actual use, with the ever greater use of the
foreign, i.e. global English, which leads speakers of Slovene to seek new ways of expressing their identity; 3) linguistic “fashion” resulting from the acceptance of dialects in the media.
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