Austria-Hungary was regarded as an old "culture language" ("") by German intellectuals and had always been granted equal rights as an official language of the Empire, but the Germans had difficulty in accepting the Slavic languages as equal to their own. On one occasion Count A. Auersperg (Anastasius Grün) entered the Diet of Carniola carrying what he claimed to be the whole corpus of Slovene literature under his arm; this was to demonstrate that the Slovene language could not be substituted for German as the language of higher education. The following years saw official recognition of several languages, at least in
Slovak language share some words and areal features with the languages surrounding them (Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, and Romanian). Slovak language Slovak () is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages (together with Czech, Polish, and Sorbian). It is called ' () or ' () in the language itself. Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by approximately 5.51 million people (2014). Slovak speakers are also found in the United States, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Serbia, Ireland, Romania, Poland, Canada, Hungary, Germany, Croatia, Israel, the United Kingdom, Australia, Austria, Ukraine, Norway and many other countries worldwide. Slovak