Czech Language

Czech Language, language spoken by most of the inhabitants of the Czech Republic, written in the Roman alphabet. It forms, together with Slovak, Polish, and Upper and Lower Sorbian (also called Wendish), the Western branch of the Slavic languages, and is spoken by 11.5 million people across the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland. Slovak, the language of Slovakia, closely resembles Czech (the Western and Central Slovak dialects are said to be mutually intelligible with Czech). Both Czechs and Slovaks used the Czech literary language until the middle of the 19th century, when a separate Slovak literary language, based on a dialect of central Slovakia, was created. In current usage, the two languages show only slight phonetic and syntactic differences. Slovak has a somewhat more archaic sound system, whereas Czech is more conservative in its inflections.

Czech differs from some other Slavic languages in the characteristic sentence intonation, the first-syllable word accent, the absence of elision, the use of the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic, the exceptionally free word order, and the prominence given to vocalic r and l. The quality of a ringing, staccato speech distinguishes it from other Western Slavic languages.

Before the 11th century Czechs wrote in Old Church Slavonic (today the language of certain Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches), the first Slavic literary language, which had been developed by SS Cyril and Methodius for missionary work in Greater Moravia (now Slovakia and the eastern region of the Czech Republic). In the 11th century two important linguistic events took place: In the West, including Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, Latin replaced Old Church Slavonic for Church and literary use, and the regional Slavic dialects began to develop into separate languages. After centuries in which Czech was a despised and suppressed peasant tongue, the 14th-century Bohemian religious reformer Jan Hus standardized Czech spelling. His stature as a national hero endowed the peasant vernacular he used with a new dignity. The work of Hus was consolidated and advanced during the 15th and 16th centuries by the Unity of Brethren, a Protestant sect later known as the Moravian Brethren. The writings of this sect stabilized the Czech language and determined its future as a literary language. By 1593, the Czech bible translation became the standard of usage. Except for the growth of vocabulary, the Czech and Slovak languages have not changed significantly since the 16th century. Modern Czech has seven noun cases, three persons in the verb, three tenses (past, present, and future), and three moods (indicative, imperative, and conditional).

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.