Czech

Introduction

Czech belongs to the west Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Czech Landscape Indo-European language family. It is spoken by 10 million people in the Czech Republic. There are also expatriate Czech communities in Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Israel, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, and USA. The worldwide population of Czech speakers is estimated at around 12 million (Ethnologue). Czech is very close to Slovak. In fact, Czech and Slovak speakers are usually able to understand each other.

Czech Emblem Czech is the official language of the Czech Republic. The dialect of Prague, capital of the country, forms the basis for Standard Czech. Standard Czech is the language of government administration, all levels of education, the media, and of publication. It is used alongside Common Czech, the colloquial spoken language.

Dialects

Czech has four major mutually intelligible dialects:

Bohemian
Central Moravian
Eastern Moravian
Silesian

The standard literary language is based on the dialect of Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. The colloquial spoken language, or Common Czech, is based on the Central Moravian dialect but is also influenced by local dialects. The Eastern Moravian dialect is a transitional variety between Czech and Slovak, while the diverse Silesian dialects gradually blend into Polish dialects spoken along the border.

There is an increasing mutual influence between Literary Czech and Common Czech, so that the main remaining differences between the two varieties now have to do with grammar and pronunciation, rather than with syntax or vocabulary.

Click here to learn more about Czech dialects.

Structure

Sound System

Below are a few distinctive features of the Czech sound system:

All vowels can be either short or long.
Stress always falls on the first syllable.
The consonants /l/ and /r/ are syllable-forming, which means that although many words are spelled without any vowels ( e.g., zmrzl "he froze," smrt "death" ), they are actually pronounced with a schwa // (as in bird)
The consonant /ř/ is unique to Czech. It can be approximatd by producing a trilled /r/ following by /zh/ (as in pleasure).

Click here to listen to common phrases in Czech.
Click here to watch short Czech videos.

Grammar

Czech

Prague

Church

Prague

Czech is a richly inflected language with a grammar that is very similar to that of other Slavic languages.

Nouns
Czech nouns are marked for gender, number, and case. The three are fused into one ending, as is the case in all Slavic languages. Czech nouns have the following grammatical categories::

genders: masculine, feminine, neuter;
numbers: singular, plural, with some vestiges of dual;
cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional, vocative, however only a few nouns have retained the vocative forms;
animate and inanimate nouns have different endings in the accusative case;
there are no articles.

Adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case.

Verbs
Czech verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. They are marked for the following categories:

three persons (first, second, third);
two numbers (singular and plural);
three tenses (present, past, future; present and future have the same endings);
two aspects (imperfective and perfective); perfective is usually formed by prefixation;
three moods (indicative, imperative, conditional);
three voices (active, middle, and passive).

Czech aspect involves grammar, lexicon, semantics, and pragmatics. Perfective verbs are formed by prefixation. The system is complex enough to have occupied generations of linguists and frustrated generations of learners.

Verbs of motion constitute a special subcategory of Czech verbs. They are characterized by a complex system of directional and aspectual prefixes and suffixes.

Word order
The neutral word order in Czech is Subject-Verb-Object. However, other orders are possible. Inflectional endings take care of keeping clear grammatical relations and roles in the sentence. Word order is principally determined by topic (what the sentence is about, or old information) and focus (new information). Constituents with old information precede constituents with new information, or those that carry the most emphasis.

Click here for a detailed grammar of Czech.

Vocabulary

National Costume

Czech Newspapers

Most of Czech vocabulary is derived from Common Slavic roots, shared by all Slavic languages. In addition, Czech has been influenced by a number of languages, especially Old Church Slavonic (introduced into the area by Constantine and Methodius in the 9th century), Latin, and German (due to integration of Czech provinces into the Habsburg Empire).

Click here to listen to common words and phrases in Czech.

Czech Phrase

Writing

Jan Hus

Until the end of the 13th century, Czech was written with an unmodified Latin alphabet. Later, this alphabet was expanded to include digraphs and trigraphs to represent Czech sounds not included in the Latin alphabet. At the beginning of the 15th century, the religious reformer Jan Hus devised a writing system in which digraphs and trigraphs were replaced with diacritics over some Latin letters to indicate palatalization of consonants and length of vowels. Digraphs and letters with diacritical marks were used alongside each other for several centuries, but the diacritics prevailed in the end. The only digraph in modern Czech is ch, that represents a velar fricative (similar to that of the German [ch] or Russian [ x]).

The modern Czech alphabet consists of 42 letters.

Czech Alphabet

Czech Orthography
Click here to listen to the pronunciation of sounds represented by the letters of the Czech alphabet.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Czech. Click on the sound icon to hear it read.

Článek 1.

Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Czech words in English
English has borrowed a few words from Czech. Here are some of them:

robot	from English translation of the 1920 play R.U.R., by Karel Capek (1890-1938); from Czech robotnik "slave," from robota "work."
howitzer	from Czech *houfnice* "catapult," introduced to Germany during the Hussite wars of the 14th century.
polka	from Czech polka, the dance, literally "Polish woman." The word may also be an alteration of Czech pulka "half," for the half-steps of Bohemian peasant dances.

Resources

Click here to find out where Czech is taught in the United States.
Click here to find learning materials for studying Czech.

Resources for the study of Czech language and culture
SEELR Czech Webliography
Czech writing system
The Czech Language
UCLA Language Profiles - Czech
Yamada Language Center Guide for Czech
Czech Reference Grammar
English-Czech bidirectional dictionary online
LangMedia Czech in the Czech Republic

Interesting Facts

(1890 -1938) was one of the most important Czech writers of the 20th century. He introduced and popularized the word robot, coined by his brother Josef. The word first appeared in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920. He is best known as a writer of science fiction, long before it became established as a separate genre. Many of his works discuss the impact of mass production, atomic weapons, and robots on civilization. In his other works, Čapek expressed fear of dictatorship, violence, and rapacious capitalism. He died on the eve of World War II.

Click here to learn more about .

Václav Havel

Václav Havel
Václav Havel is a Czech writer and dramatist. He was the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic.

Click here to learn more about Václav Havel .