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Upper Carniola ( ; ; ) is a traditional region of Slovenia, the northern mountainous part of the larger Carniola region. The largest town in the region is Kranj, and other urban centers include Kamnik, Jesenice, Domžale and Škofja Loka. It has around 300,000 inhabitants or 14% of the population of Slovenia.
This division remained, in different arrangements, up to the 1860s, when the old administrative districts were abolished and Upper Carniola was subdivided into smaller districts of Kranj, Radovljica and Kamnik. Nevertheless, the regional identity remained strong also thereafter. Upon the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after World War I, Carniola was incorporated first into the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs and then into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and it ceased to exist as a separate political and geographical unit. The Carniolan regional identity soon faded away, but the regional identification with its sub-units (Upper, Lower and, to a lesser extent, Inner Carniola) remained strong.
The landscape is characterised by the mountains of the Southern Limestone Alps, predominantly by the Julian Alps and the Karawanks range at its northern rim.
Historically, Ljubljana was part of Upper Carniola. However, in the 19th century it started to be considered a separate unit; already by the late 18th century, there are very few reference to the people of Ljubljana as "Upper Carniolans" ( Gorenjci, Oberkrainer): it was a general perception that Upper Carniola proper starts only north of Ljubljana, although Šentvid and Črnuče, a suburbs of Ljubljana, is sometimes considered to be a part of the Upper Carniola. Since the 19th century, Kranj, not Ljubljana, has been considered the unofficial capital of Upper Carniola.
The modern notion of Upper Carniola does not fully correspond to the historical borders. For example, the Municipality of Jezersko had been part of the Duchy of Carinthia since the 11th century. In 1918, it was occupied by Slovenes volunteers and annexed to Yugoslavia by the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain. Now it is today generally considered an integral part of Upper Carniola, rather than Slovenian Carinthia (also because its inhabitants speak the Upper Carniolan dialect). The borders of Upper Carniola are only vaguely similar those of Slovenia's Upper Carniola Statistical Region.
These two Upper Carniolan dialects are spoken in the vast majority of the region: this convergence of linguistic and geographical borders is quite exceptional in Slovenia, and it reinforces the cohesiveness of Upper Carniolan regional identity.
Nevertheless, other dialects are spoken in Upper Carniola, as well: in the village of Rateče, people speak the Gail Valley dialect, which belongs to the Carinthian dialect group. In the area around Kranjska Gora and Gozd Martuljek, a transitional dialect between the Carinthian and Upper Carniolan dialect group is spoken: this is known as the Kranjska Gora subdialect. In the mountainous areas of eastern Upper Carniola (mostly in the municipalities of Škofja Loka and Gorenja vas-Poljane), dialects from the Rovte dialect group are spoken (Poljane dialect, Škofja Loka dialect, Horjul dialect). In the extreme south-eastern part of Upper Carniola the Zagorje-Trbovlje subdialect is spoken, which belongs to the Styrian dialect group.
Beginning in the 18th century, the Upper Carniolan dialect was partially incorporated into standard Slovene language, together with the Lower Carniolan dialect and the dialect of Ljubljana. During the late Enlightenment and early Romantic period, many of the most important Slovene authors and philologists came from the region: Jurij Japelj, Anton Tomaž Linhart, Jernej Kopitar, Matija Čop, and Janez Bleiweis. The poet and journalist Valentin Vodnik, who was born in Šiška, now a suburb of Ljubljana, also had influences of Upper Carniolan dialect. The first two Slovene-language newspapers, Lublanske novice (1797–1800) and Kmetijske in rokodelske novice were also published in the Upper Carniolan regional variety of Slovene. The poetic language of France Prešeren, the Slovenian national poet, also has many specific Upper Carniolan features, yet the spent most of his life in Ljubljana. Most of the Slovene literary production from that period (1780–1840) thus had recognizable Upper Carniolan linguistic features. In the 1840s and 1850s, many of these features were removed from the literary standard; nevertheless, a basic agreement was reached among Slovene philologist, according to which the vowel system in the standard language was taken from the Upper Carniolan dialect, and the consonant system from Lower Carniolan.
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