Paper presented at the meeting of the Slavicists of the Us of Ljubljana & Klagenfurt/Celovec, Ljubljana, 16-18 May 1985. The first Slovene grammarian to notice the suffix -as in the Slovene language appears to have been F. Metelko (1825). Though a few -as-Ns are used in the popular speech of Carniola, they are mostly limited to Eastern Slovenia (& the Kajkavian area) & to a few geographic islands (Tolminsko, Bela krajina). In Standard Slovene, many -as-Ns have been borrowed from Serbo-Croatian or coined for terminological purposes. In 1904, K. Strekelj proved the suffix to be of Hungarian origin. Since then, -as-Ns have been attacked by purists as inappropriate for Standard Slovene. However, for an objective attitude, it is necessary to have a detailed description of their formal, semantic, & stylistic features. Modified HA