When the Classroom Goes Silent: How COVID-19 Frayed a Minority Language’s Lifeline in Croatia

When schools and cultural societies closed their doors in the spring of 2020, the immediate concern for most educators was how to keep lessons going. For teachers of Slovene in Croatia, the stakes were considerably higher. In many of their students’ lives, the weekly language lesson is not a supplement to everyday exposure to Slovene—it is the only regular contact with the language they have. New research published in Frontiers in Education shows that although Slovene instruction in Croatia formally continued throughout the pandemic, that formal continuity often masked a deeper disruption: the loss of the very conditions that made the classroom a living space of language contact.

The study, conducted by Barbara Riman and Mojca Medvešek of the Institute for Ethnic Studies in Ljubljana, draws on an online survey of eighteen teachers of Slovene in Croatia carried out in April 2021, at the height of pandemic restrictions, together with a retrospective follow-up questionnaire completed by eight of those teachers in 2026. Because only around twenty teachers of Slovene were active in Croatia during the 2020/21 school year, the 2021 sample captured a large proportion of the entire professional population, although most respondents taught supplementary, extracurricular classes rather than lessons embedded in the regular school system. The authors deliberately treat the 2026 responses not as a second measurement point but as a qualitative lens through which the immediate pandemic-era findings can be reinterpreted with hindsight.

The sociolinguistic context explains why the stakes were so high. The number of Croatian residents reporting Slovene as their mother tongue fell from 19,341 in 1991 to 7,620 in 2021, a decline that points to a narrowing base of potential speakers and to weakened intergenerational transmission. Previous studies have documented that Croatian predominates in family communication among many children and young people learning Slovene, and that opportunities to use Slovene in public life in Croatia are limited. In the theoretical framework of the study, drawing on Joshua Fishman’s work on reversing language shift, institutional support alone cannot sustain a language once it has receded from everyday family and community use—but where such use is fragile, organised instruction may become one of the few structured settings in which learners regularly hear and speak the language.

Slovene instruction in Croatia takes several institutionally distinct forms, and the pandemic treated them unevenly. Slovene Language and Culture is taught under the so-called Model C within Croatian primary and secondary schools, and university-level Slovene programmes operate in Zagreb, Zadar and Rijeka; both could plug into existing school and university digital platforms when teaching moved online. By contrast, supplementary Slovene language and culture classes, funded by the Republic of Slovenia and usually hosted on the premises of Slovene cultural associations, depended on physical access to those premises, on local organisational capacity, and on sustained family engagement. A further extracurricular programme in Varaždin County relies on teachers commuting from Slovenian schools across the border, making it acutely sensitive to border restrictions and the closure of school buildings. Indicative figures for the 2020/21 school year suggest that supplementary classes involved 287 learners, Model C instruction 221, and the Varaždin programme 217—substantial numbers for a small minority community.

The survey data reveal a striking paradox. Twelve of sixteen teachers reported that their Slovene instruction was included in official pandemic education measures, and most judged those measures favourably or neutrally. Yet in 2020 not a single respondent taught fully in person: ten taught partly in person and partly remotely, and five taught entirely remotely, with exclusive remote delivery lasting up to twelve weeks for four teachers, between twelve and eighteen weeks for four more, and more than twenty-four weeks for three. At the time of the survey in April 2021, eight teachers were still teaching in hybrid mode and seven entirely online. Instruction had formally survived—but, as the authors put it, formal continuation did not amount to stable, interaction-rich contact with the language.

The pedagogical consequences were most visible in spoken interaction. Nine of sixteen teachers said they could not achieve their set teaching objectives under the adapted modes, and of the fifteen who assessed learning outcomes during remote instruction, only two judged that the majority of their students had achieved the expected learning standards; nine said students reached only the minimum standards, and three could not assess them at all. In the 2026 follow-up, teachers explained why. One noted that in-person classes offered more room for playful activities—joking, laughing, singing and dancing—making lessons more dynamic, while another observed that motivational games over Zoom simply did not have the same effect as classroom activities. A third teacher summarised the underlying principle: language learning is most successful through contact between speakers. For younger learners in particular, remote formats reduced immediate teacher support, spontaneous interaction and real-time feedback—the very mechanisms through which a minority language becomes audible and usable.

Participation itself proved fragile, and the reasons were social rather than technological. Seven of fifteen teachers estimated that roughly three quarters of their learners participated regularly in remote lessons, four estimated about half, and four estimated fewer than half; not one teacher said all learners participated. The most widely endorsed explanation for non-participation was a lack of a supportive environment at home, cited by nine of fifteen teachers, while lack of interest was not seen as the dominant factor. Parental help, teachers reported, depended on parents’ own knowledge of Slovene, their time and their energy—and was unevenly distributed across families. One teacher was unequivocal in the follow-up: during the pandemic, organised lessons were her learners’ only contact with Slovene, because very few of them spoke the language at home. Another reported that for almost all of her secondary-school students, the class was their sole regular exposure to the language.

The pandemic also severed the informal channels that normally reinforce classroom learning. Teachers described how restrictions on movement cut learners off from Slovene-speaking relatives, from peers, and from leisure activities in Slovenia, slowing progress even among children who had previously used the language with grandparents or family across the border. Teachers themselves compensated with considerable additional labour: twelve of fifteen prepared their own teaching materials, eleven adapted materials from other sources to their learners’ proficiency levels, and most maintained contact through messages and individual instructions. In the retrospective accounts, remote teaching depended not on any single platform but on a broader infrastructure—equipment, internet connectivity, institutional approval, collegial networks and, in some cases, teachers personally covering the cost of internet access. Ten of the eighteen surveyed teachers worked on contractual arrangements rather than permanent employment, underscoring how precarious the professional base of this instruction already was.

Perhaps surprisingly, the 2026 follow-up found no uniform, lasting collapse in interest. Several teachers reported no long-term changes in enrolment or motivation, attributing fluctuations to the changing interests of successive student cohorts rather than to the pandemic, and some pandemic-era adaptations persisted productively: closer collaboration and material exchange among teachers, new digital resources, online consultations that suit adult learners by removing travel barriers, and published teaching materials originally developed for remote instruction. Yet the authors caution against reading this as resilience. They conceptualise the pattern as structural fragility: organised instruction can continue on paper even as the institutional, organisational, pedagogical, social and communicative conditions that make it a genuine space of language contact are disrupted. The finding is not that learners’ competence declined—the study measured no proficiency tests—but that the infrastructure of exposure proved vulnerable precisely where it mattered most.

The implications reach well beyond the Slovene community in Croatia. Wherever a minority language has weakened intergenerational transmission, the classroom may be the last regular venue in which children encounter it, and crisis planning for minority-language education must therefore address the practical conditions of continuity: access to teaching spaces or digital channels, stable teacher employment, coordination across borders, quality materials, and support for families. Legal recognition, the authors note, is a necessary but insufficient guarantee—Croatia’s minority-language legislation and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages provide a framework, but the pandemic showed that effectiveness depends on implementation. The resilience of minority-language schooling in a crisis, the study concludes, rests not on the mere possibility of remote delivery but on the wider institutional, community and communicative scaffolding that keeps a language present in learners’ lives—even, and especially, when the classroom door closes.

Subject of Research: The continuity and fragility of organised Slovene minority-language instruction in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article Title: Organised instruction as a fragile space of minority-language contact: Slovene in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article References: Organised instruction as a fragile space of minority-language contact: Slovene in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1950848

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1950848

Keywords: minority languages, Slovene in Croatia, COVID-19 pandemic, language maintenance, heritage-language education, intergenerational transmission, remote instruction, language policy, supplementary classes, sociolinguistics, teacher survey, structural fragility