and descendants of Serbian Uskoks, guerilla warriors against Ottoman invasions. Romani Romani, spoken in 2002 as the native language by 0.2% of people, is a legally protected language in Slovenia. These people mainly belong to the geographically dispersed and marginalized Roma community. German German and Bavarian dialects have been autochthonous since present-day Slovenia came under the rule of Bavaria in the 8th century. Whereas many immigrants from German-speaking areas adopted Slovene over the centuries, others retained their language. Until the 20th century, the most numerous German-speaking communities were found in the urban centers of Lower Styria, in the Gottschee County in southern Slovenia and in the villages around Apače (Apaško polje) along the Mura river. According to the last Austrian census of 1910, around 9% of the population of present-day Slovenia spoke German as their native tongue. Towns with a German-speaking majority included Maribor, Celje, Ptuj, Kočevje, Slovenj Gradec, Slovenska Bistrica, Ormož, Dravograd and some other smaller towns. After World War I, the number of German-speakers dropped significantly: most of the towns were slovenized, and German remained the majority language only in the Gottschee County and around Apače. According to the last pre-WWII Yugoslav census, German speakers amounted to 2.5% of the overall population. Former German or bilingual speakers had switched to Slovene, the official language. During World War II, ethnic Germans were resettled from areas occupied by Italy (Ljubljana, Gottschee) into the German-occupied zone. On the end and after the war, the great majority of the remaining Germans were expropriated (AVNOJ-Decree), expulsed or murdered by Yugoslav partisans. In the census of 2002, just 1,628 persons (0.1% of the population) declared German as their mother tongue. Almost everyone today born in Slovenia knows Slovene because people learn obligatory Slovene in school, but many at home speak other languages as well. The number of people fluent in German is unknown. German-speaking women around Maribor who are citizens of Slovenia have organized in the association Kulturno društvo nemško govorečih žena »Mostovi« Maribor ("Bridges"). Gottscheerish Gottscheerish or Granish is a Bavarian dialect of the German language and has been spoken in the Gottschee County around Kočevje (Gottschee) since 1330. For over 600 years, it was the predominant oral language of the Gottscheers in that area, whereas Standard German was their written language. Most Gottschee Germans were resettled by the German occupation forces in 1941 during World War II. Only a few hundred Gottscheers