Slovak

Introduction

Slovakie Map Slovak (also called Slovakian) belongs to the west Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken by slightly over 4.8 million people in Slovakia. There are also expatriate Slovak communities in Canada, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia House Ukraine, and USA..The total number of Slovak speakers worldwide is estimated at around 5 million (Ethnologue). Slovak is very close to Czech. In fact, Slovak and Czech speakers are usually able to understand each other. However, with the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993, the two languages have begun to drift apart.

Slovak home Slovak is the official language of the Republik of Slovakia. Standard Slovak is the language of government administration, all levels of education, the media, and of publication. Slovak was standardized only in the early part of the 19th century.

Dialects

Slovak dialects are fragmented by the country's mountainous terrain. They are, however, mutually intelligible. Slovak is usually divided into three major dialect areas:

Central Slovak on which Standard Slovak is primarily based;
Western Slovak which merges with the Moravian dialect of Czech;
Eastern Slovak which merges with Polish dialects along the border.

Structure

Sound System

Children

Below are some of the distinctive features of the Slovak sound system:

All vowels can be either short or long. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning.
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., smrt "death" ), they are actually pronounced with a schwa // (as in bird). Just like vowels, Slovak /l/ and /r/ can be either short or long.
Some consonants are either unpalatalized or palatalized. Palatalization distinguishes word meaning.

Click here to listen to common phrases in Slovak.
Click here to listen to the BBC in Slovak.
Click here to watch short Slovak videos.

Grammar

dancing

Slovak woman

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

Nouns
Slovak nouns are marked for gender, number, and case. The three are fused into one ending, as is the case in all Slavic languages.

genders: masculine, feminine, neuter;
numbers: singular, plural, with some vestiges of dual;
cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional, vocative, however, relatively 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.

Click here for a more detailed description of Slovak nouns.

Verbs
Slovak 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).

Slovak 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 Slovak verbs. They are characterized by a complex system of directional and aspectual prefixes and suffixes.

Click here to learn more about Slovak verbs.

Word order
The neutral word order in Slovak is Subject-Verb-Object. However, other orders are also possible since 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.

Vocabulary

Slovak church

Most of Slovak vocabulary is derived from Common Slavic roots, shared by all Slavic languages. In addition, Slovak 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, neighboring Hungarian, and most recently by English.

Here are a few common phrases in Slovak.

Common Phrases in Slovak

Below are the Slovak numerals 1-10.

Writing

Slovak Restaurant

Although Slovak appears in Latin documents of the 11th–15th centuries, serious attempts to write it for religious use were made by Catholic missionaries only in the 17th-18th centuries. This written language was not accepted as a literary language. In the first part of the 19th century, a Protestant group introduced a written language based on the Central dialect. This written language gained approval and became the literary standard.

The modern Slovak alphabet consists of 44 letters.

Slovak alphabet

Slovak Orthography

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Slovak and compare it to Czech to see the close similarities between the two languages.

Slovak

Článok 1.

Czech

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.

Resources

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

Resources for the study of Slovak language and culture
SEELR Slovak Webliography
Slovak writing system
UCLA Language Profiles -Slovak
Yamada Language Center Guide for Slovak
Wikipedia article on Slovak
Ethnologue entry for Slovak
LangMedia Slovak in Slovakia