The main purpose of this master's thesis is to study the current use of Slovene pairs of nouns with the same root and variant suffixes -vec and -lec for masculine, or vka and lka for feminine nouns. The circumstances that have led to the variation were examined as well. The thesis thoroughly describes linguistic developments in the 19th century. Special attention was paid to the controversies related to hypercorrection of the final l-sounds in past participles, which occurred in Slovene in the 19th century. The variant use of the derived forms is a direct consequence to this phenomenon. In the main part of the paper, variation in language in modern usage was analyzed. We observed it at two levels, namely within Gigafida, a corpus of language in general public use, and within Janes, a corpus of informal public use online. Analysis was carried out on the examples that showed the highest degree of variation, i.e. in the corpora, they appeared with one or the other suffix in equal numbers. The usage in each of the corpora was then compared. The study’s aim was to determine whether the usage in the corpora varies and, if so, why. The analysis also included the information on which forms are prescribed by the two main traditional dictionaries for Slovene, as well as which forms are accepted as correct by the Microsoft Office, Google Docs and Libre Office spellcheckers. The analysis aimed to find patterns in the use of one or the other form of nouns. The research questions of the thesis were whether there is a unison among the forms in the two corpora and the codified forms in dictionaries and spellcheckers, whether there are similarities between the use of feminine and masculine nouns, and whether the variation is higher for rare nouns.
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