Dual in Slovenian

Abstract

Slovenian is one of only three contemporary Slavic languages which productively use the dual. In Standard Slovenian, all number-inflecting parts of speech exhibit special forms for the dual, but Slovenian dialects exhibit significant variation in the expression of dual, with most having neutralized one part of the dual paradigm or another. Although dual nouns are typically used together with the numeral ‘two’ or quantifier ‘both’, this is neither a hard-and-fast nor an across-the-board rule. The dual is traditionally described as the number referring to the value of ‘two’ or ‘one plus one’, but it is not used with pair nouns, such as paired body parts, despite their inherent duality. Its interpretation seems closest to that of the numeral ‘two’.