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This article seeks to shed light on the beginnings of Germanic philology in the Slovene lands, concentrating both on the leading figure of Dr Jakob Kelemina (1882--1957), who established Germanic philology in the Slovene academic space and dominated it for many years, and on the profile of his students from the Slovene, Italian, and Croatian littoral. The findings, which are based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of archive sources, lecture lists and student records, and on Bourdieu's classification of education opportunities by economic and cultural capital, show that students from the coastal regions made up 17% of the 916 students of both sexes who attended lectures on Germanic philology up until the end of the Second World War; of these, 54% were women. The students' social origin was found to have had considerable influence on their decision to take up such studies, as the large majority came from the middle and upper strata of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]