Slovene Americans

There are 171,923 Slovene Americans as of the 2010 Census. Slovenes are a south Slavic people, primarily residing in the central European country of Slovenia, with Slovene minorities in the neighboring countries of Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. Slovenia was part of both the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, and it was later a constituent state of Yugoslavia, which split apart after the fall of European communism in the 1990s. Slovenia has been an independent democracy since 1991.

Slovenes began settling in the state of Georgia in the 1730s, two generations before the Revolutionary War, and bilingual Slovene Germans were among the first settlers of communities in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Sustained Slovene immigration began in 1880 and continued until 1924 legislation imposed nationality-based quotas on immigration. Because of the vagueness of the language used by both immigration officials and the Census Bureau at the time, it is difficult to pinpoint exact numbers; Slavonic, Slavic, Austrian, Croat, and simply European were all labels that could be and were attached to the incoming Slovenes. By and large, Slovenes settled in industrial counties and the mining communities of western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. Another wave of immigration came after World War II, in part due to the devastation of that war in Europe and in part as Slovenes fled the newly communist Yugoslavia.

Slovene Americans are the most concentrated in Ohio (by far, with over 60,000 Slovenes), Pennsylvania (a third as many), and Illinois (about 16,000). The Chicago Slovene community established the first Slovene American newspaper, [Page 1968]Amerikanski Slovenec, and numerous other communities established fraternal organizations and social clubs, providing social networking, insurance, and other services. Cleveland has become the largest Slovene American community and the cultural capital of Slovene America; Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee are all large as well.