Off topic but funny at an interview with the First Lady,
Van Susteran, "What language is spoken in Slovenia?"
First Lady, looking irritated, "Slovenian."
I would not have known that either. And I majored in foreign languages, and am pretty good on what's spoken where. I probably would have thought Serbo-Croatian, which was the majority language in what used to be Yugoslavia. And apparently is widely spoken in Slovenia as well.
When we got involved in Bosnia under Clinton, in the mid-90's, the military had a lot of Russian linguists but relatively few Serbo-Croatian linguists. Fortunately, S-C is quite close to Russian. So the Defense Language Institute created a special course to transition Russian linguists to S-C. The unofficial name for it was "Turbo Serbo".
