The dual in diatopic and diachronic perspective: A century after Tesnière’s 1925 study on the dual in Slovene

Professor Janez Orešnik said the dual number is one of the “uniques” – or unique features – in Slovene. Uniques are peculiarities in a language that are assumed to be limited to that lan­guage only. The author of this article has been researching dual number in Slovene for over 20 years. During this time, she has published two monographs and numerous articles on this topic. She is grateful to Professor Orešnik that, at his insistence, she transferred the knowl­edge of this typically Slovenian category into English, so the knowledge of the Slovenian dual number (both in the literary language and in dialects) became accessible to non-Slovene and non-Slavic linguists as well.