The paper reflects on the status of Slovene as the language of instruction at national universities and considers the efforts of the Rectors' Conference to introduce English as a language of instruction, or that the language of instruction at specific universities be determined in their statutes. On the one hand we have the potential language defection of part of the Slovene university elite, references to foreign students and the misunderstanding of internationalisation and the openness of our lectures, the common European university space, the Bologna process, and the wish for as many lectures as possible in English. On the other, we have the independence of Slovene, which is according to the constitution the country's official/national/first language and is also the mother tongue of the majority of its citizens, and the contradictions between the Higher Education Act and the provisions of the Resolution on national language policy and the Slovene Language Act. The questions and challenges for Slovene as a language of instruction and of scholarship are posed by these (apparently) mutually exclusive contradictions.
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