Learning a foreign language is useful regardless of age, so the inclusion of additional educational programs in the field of foreign professional languages should be also useful for students in the period of their higher education. Slovenia is characterized by a relatively greater need for knowledge of foreign languages due to the size of the Slovene-speaking community. In the field of business, besides English, the most frequent contacts of the Slovene-speaking population are with the languages surrounding the Slovene-speaking area. The results of the analysis of the needs among Slovenian students and graduates in the field of business and economics and the opinion of business and economics experts confirm that the introduction of the Croatian language in the higher education programs in this particular field would be reasonable. The Croatian language, however, is still strongly present in the Slovene-speaking area. It ranks second in terms of the average knowledge among the 21 foreign languages studied, but lags far behind English. The average respondent masters the Croatian language at A2 level of knowledge. At the same time, Croatian language ranks third in terms of perceived usefulness of its knowledge, with almost 70% of respondents perceiving the Croatian language as mostly or very useful. The student population shows a relatively high interest in learning the Croatian language, since 30% would certainly attend Croatian lessons, if this possibility existed, and another 20% are indecisive at the moment. At the same time, 80% of those who show an interest in learning Croatian language are willing to pay for these lessons. The positive attitude towards Croatian language and sense of closeness with it are predictors for learning the Croatian. The proposed educational program is feasible from the financial aspect. We also recommend dividing it into two levels of difficulty.
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