Czech language

Czech (čeština) is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. Czech is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak, Polish, and Sorbian. Czech can be used in all official proceedings also in Slovakia as granted by Article 6 of Slovak Minority Language Act. Czech is also one of the 23 official languages in the European Union.

The name "čeština" is derived from a Slavic tribe of Czechs that inhabited Central Bohemia and united neighbouring Slavic tribes under the reign of the Přemyslid dynasty. The Czech language developed from the Proto-Slavic language at the close of the 1st millennium.

Two distinct variants or interdialects of spoken Czech can be found in the Czech Republic, both corresponding more or less to geographic areas within the country. The first, and most widely used, is "Common Czech", spoken especially in Bohemia. It has some grammatical differences from "standard" Czech, along with some differences in pronunciation.

The second major variant is spoken in Moravia and Silesia. Nowadays it is very close to the Bohemian form of Common Czech. This variant has some words different from its standard Czech equivalents. Unlike in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia have more local dialects varying from place to place; however, just as in Bohemia, most have been heavily influenced and mostly replaced by Common Czech. Everyday spoken form in Moravia and Silesia would be a mixture of remnants of old local dialect, some Standard Czech forms and especially Common Czech.

The Standard Czech was standardized in the 19th century, based on an already two hundred years old translation of the Bible (Bible of Kralice) using an older variant of the then-current language. These standard forms are still common in spoken language in Moravia and Silesia.

Some south Moravian dialects are also sometimes, although rarely, considered to be dialects of the Slovak language, which has its roots in the Moravian empire when Slovaks and Moravians were one nation (without Bohemians) with one language. Those dialects still have the same suffixes as Slovak.

Speakers of Czech and Slovak usually understand both languages in their written and spoken form, though some dialects or heavily accented speech in either language might present difficulties to speakers of the other. Younger generations of Czechs living after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 (therefore generally less familiar with Slovak) might also have some problems with a certain number of words and expressions which differ considerably in the two languages, and with false friends. Nevertheless, these differences do not impede mutual intelligibility significantly.

The phonology of Czech may be very difficult for speakers of other languages. For example, some words do not appear to have vowels. A popular example of this is the phrase "strč prst skrz krk" meaning "stick a finger through your throat". The consonants l and r can function as the nucleus of a syllable in Czech, since they are sonorant consonants. It also features the consonant ř, a phoneme that is said to be unique to Czech. To a foreign ear, it sounds very similar to zh, though a better approximation could be rolled r combined with zh.

As in most Slavic languages, many words have many forms or inflections. In this regard, Czech and the Slavic languages are closer to their Indo-European origins than other languages in the same family that have lost much inflection. Moreover, in Czech the rules of morphology are extremely irregular and many forms have official, colloquial, and sometimes semi-official variants.

The Czech word order is basically subject-verb-object. It serves similar function as emphasis and articles in English. Often all the permutations of words in a clause are possible. While the permutations mostly share the same meaning, they differ in the topic-focus articulation.

Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numbers are declined (7 cases over a number of declension models) and verbs are conjugated; the other parts of speech are not inflected (with the exception of comparative formation in adverbs).

Information: Wikipedia