Slovak Language

Slovak Language, a member of the West Slavic branch of Indo-European languages. It is spoken by slightly fewer than 5 million people in Slovakia and by over half a million outside the country (in Hungary, Yugoslavia, the United States, and Canada, among others). It is most closely related to the Czech language, under whose cultural influence it has developed through most of its history. Slovak is said to be the Slavic language most intelligible to the speakers of the other Slavic languages, because of its conservative sound system, its preservation of basic Slavic word-roots, and its comparatively transparent morphology. It is divided into three dialect areas: West, Central, and East. The Western and Central dialects are said to be mutually intelligible with the Czech language. Slovak came into its own as a national language, based on the Central Slovak dialect, comparatively late. The development of a multifunctional Slovak literary language in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was prompted by a rise in national consciousness and the accompanying need for education and literacy in the population of what was then a part of the Habsburg Empire.

Slovak preserves the Common Slavic contrast of short and long vowels (the latter represented by an acute accent mark) and has in addition developed a set of diphthongs (ia, ie, iu, ou, uo=ô), which count as long vowels. The sounds r and l function as either consonants or vowels and, as vowels, can be either long or short. The spelling of the consonants č (pronounced ch), š (sh), and ž (zh) is as in Czech. Slovak has the soft dental consonants t', d', l', n, but lacks a soft r. Stress falls on the first syllable of a word.

Slovak nouns exhibit three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative), the historical vocative having been lost except in a few masculine nouns. Adjectives agree with nouns in gender, number (singular and plural), and case. Verbs have two tenses, past and present, and two aspects, perfective and imperfective. Many verbs have an iterative for expressing repeated action. A pluperfect tense, produced by compounding the past tense of the verb and the past tense of “to be”, is sometimes used. Rules of word order tend to place the most informative elements of a sentence at the end, often resulting in a violation of subject-verb-object order. The numeral system in Slovak, as in most Slavic languages, is quite complex.

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