The Czech–Slovak group developed within West Slavic in thehigh medieval period, and the standardization of Czech and Slovak within the Czech–Slovak dialect continuum emerged in the early modern period. In the later 18th to mid-19th century, the modern written standard became codified in the context of theCzech National Revival. The most widely spokennon-standard variety, known as Common Czech, is based on thevernacular ofPrague, but is now spoken as aninterdialect throughout most ofBohemia. TheMoravian dialects spoken inMoravia andCzech Silesia are considerably more varied than the dialects of Bohemia.[8]
Czech has a moderately-sized phoneme inventory, comprising tenmonophthongs, threediphthongs and 25 consonants (divided into "hard", "neutral" and "soft" categories). Words may contain complicated consonant clusters or lack vowels altogether. Czech has araised alveolar trill, which is known to occur as aphoneme in only a few other languages, represented by thegraphemeř.
The West Slavic languages are spoken in Central Europe. Czech is distinguished from other West Slavic languages by a more-restricted distinction between "hard" and "soft" consonants (seePhonology below).[9]
The term "Old Czech" is applied to the period predating the 16th century, with the earliest records of the high medieval period also classified as "early Old Czech", but the term "Medieval Czech" is also used. The function of the written language was initially performed byOld Slavonic written inGlagolitic, later byLatin written inLatin script.
The Bohemian (Czech) language is first recorded in writing in glosses and short notes during the 12th to 13th centuries. Literary works written in Czech appear in the late 13th and early 14th century and administrative documents first appear towards the late 14th century. The first completeBible translation, theLeskovec-Dresden Bible, also dates to this period.[12] Old Czech texts, including poetry and cookbooks, were also produced outside universities.[13]
Literary activity becomes widespread in the early 15th century in the context of theBohemian Reformation.Jan Hus contributed significantly to the standardization ofCzech orthography, advocated for widespread literacy among Czech commoners (particularly in religion) and made early efforts to model written Czech after the spoken language.[12]
There was no standardization distinguishing between Czech and Slovak prior to the 15th century. In the 16th century, the division between Czech and Slovak becomes apparent, marking the confessional division between Lutheran Protestants in Slovakia using Czech orthography and Catholics, especially Slovak Jesuits, beginning to use a separate Slovak orthography based on Western Slovak dialects.[14][15]
The publication of theKralice Bible between 1579 and 1593 (the first complete Czech translation of the Bible from the original languages) became very important for standardization of the Czech language in the following centuries as it was used as a model for the standard language.[16]
In 1615, the Bohemiandiet tried to declare Czech to be the only official language of the kingdom. After theBohemian Revolt (of predominantly Protestant aristocracy) which was defeated by theHabsburgs in 1620, the Protestant intellectuals had to leave the country. This emigration together with other consequences of theThirty Years' War had a negative impact on the further use of the Czech language. In 1627, Czech and German became official languages of the Kingdom of Bohemia and in the 18th century German became dominant in Bohemia and Moravia, especially among the upper classes.[17]
Modern standard Czech originates in standardization efforts of the 18th century.[18] By then the language had developed a literary tradition, and since then it has changed little; journals from that period contain no substantial differences from modern standard Czech, and contemporary Czechs can understand them with little difficulty.[19] At some point before the 18th century, the Czech language abandoned a distinction between phonemic /l/ and /ʎ/ which survives in Slovak.[20]
With the beginning of the national revival of the mid-18th century, Czech historians began to emphasize their people's accomplishments from the 15th through 17th centuries, rebelling against theCounter-Reformation (the Habsburg re-catholization efforts which had denigrated Czech and other non-Latin languages).[21] Czechphilologists studied sixteenth-century texts and advocated the return of the language tohigh culture.[22] This period is known as the Czech National Revival[23] (or Renaissance).[22]
During the national revival, in 1809 linguist and historianJosef Dobrovský released a German-language grammar of Old Czech entitledAusführliches Lehrgebäude der böhmischen Sprache ('Comprehensive Doctrine of the Bohemian Language'). Dobrovský had intended his book to bedescriptive, and did not think Czech had a realistic chance of returning as a major language. However,Josef Jungmann and other revivalists used Dobrovský's book to advocate for a Czech linguistic revival.[23] Changes during this time included spelling reform (notably,í in place of the formerj andj in place ofg), the use oft (rather thanti) to end infinitive verbs and the non-capitalization of nouns (which had been a late borrowing from German).[20] These changes differentiated Czech from Slovak.[24] Modern scholars disagree about whether the conservative revivalists were motivated by nationalism or considered contemporary spoken Czech unsuitable for formal, widespread use.[23]
Adherence to historical patterns was later relaxed and standard Czech adopted a number of features from Common Czech (a widespread informal interdialectal variety), such as leaving some proper nouns undeclined. This has resulted in a relatively high level of homogeneity among all varieties of the language.[25]
As the official language of the Czech Republic (a member of theEuropean Union since 2004), Czech is one of the EU's official languages and the 2012 Eurobarometer survey found that Czech was the foreign language most often used in Slovakia.[27] Economist Jonathan van Parys collected data on language knowledge in Europe for the 2012European Day of Languages. The five countries with the greatest use of Czech were theCzech Republic (98.77 percent),Slovakia (24.86 percent),Portugal (1.93 percent),Poland (0.98 percent) andGermany (0.47 percent).[28]
Czech speakers in Slovakia primarily live in cities. Since it is a recognizedminority language in Slovakia, Slovak citizens who speak only Czech may communicate with the government in their language in the same way that Slovak speakers in the Czech Republic also do.[29]
Standard Czech contains ten basicvowelphonemes, and three diphthongs. The vowels are/a/,/ɛ/,/ɪ/,/o/,and/u/, and their long counterparts/aː/,/ɛː/,/iː/,/oː/and/uː/. The diphthongs are/ou̯/,/au̯/and/ɛu̯/; the last two are found only in loanwords such asauto "car" andeuro "euro".[33]
In Czech orthography, the vowels are spelled as follows:
Short:a, e/ě, i/y, o, u
Long:á, é, í/ý, ó, ú/ů
Diphthongs:ou, au, eu
The letter⟨ě⟩ indicates that the previous consonant is palatalized (e.g.něco/ɲɛt͡so/). After a labial it represents/jɛ/ (e.g.běs/bjɛs/); but⟨mě⟩ is pronounced /mɲɛ/, cf.měkký (/mɲɛkiː/).[34]
Czech consonants are categorized as "hard", "neutral", or "soft":
Hard:/d/,/ɡ/,/ɦ/,/k/,/n/,/r/,/t/,/x/
Neutral:/b/,/f/,/l/,/m/,/p/,/s/,/v/,/z/
Soft:/c/,/ɟ/,/j/,/ɲ/,/r̝/,/ʃ/,/t͡s/,/t͡ʃ/,/ʒ/
Hard consonants may not be followed byi orí in writing, or soft ones byy orý (except in loanwords such askilogram).[36] Neutral consonants may take either character. Hard consonants are sometimes known as "strong", and soft ones as "weak".[37] This distinction is also relevant to thedeclension patterns of nouns, which vary according to whether the final consonant of the noun stem is hard or soft.[38]
Voicedconsonants with unvoiced counterparts are unvoiced at the end of a word before a pause, and inconsonant clustersvoicing assimilation occurs, which matches voicing to the following consonant. The unvoiced counterpart of /ɦ/ is /x/.[39]
The phoneme represented by the letterř (capitalŘ) is very rare among languages and often claimed to be unique to Czech, though it also occurs in some dialects ofKashubian, and formerly occurred in Polish.[40] It represents theraised alveolar non-sonorant trill (IPA:[r̝]), a sound somewhere between Czechr andž (example:"řeka" (river)ⓘ),[41] and is present inDvořák. In unvoiced environments, /r̝/ is realized as its voiceless allophone [r̝̊], a sound somewhere between Czechr andš.[42]
Each word has primarystress on its firstsyllable, except forenclitics (minor, monosyllabic, unstressed syllables). In all words of more than two syllables, every odd-numbered syllable receives secondary stress. Stress is unrelated to vowel length; both long and short vowels can be stressed or unstressed.[44] Vowels are never reduced (e.g. toschwa sounds) when unstressed.[45] When a noun is preceded by a monosyllabic preposition, the stress usually moves to the preposition, e.g.do Prahy "to Prague".[46]
Czech grammar, like that of other Slavic languages, isfusional; its nouns, verbs, and adjectives areinflected by phonological processes to modify their meanings and grammatical functions, and the easily separableaffixes characteristic ofagglutinative languages are limited.[47] Czech inflects for case, gender and number in nouns and tense, aspect,mood, person and subject number and gender in verbs.[48]
Parts of speech include adjectives,adverbs, numbers,interrogative words,prepositions,conjunctions andinterjections.[49] Adverbs are primarily formed from adjectives by taking the finalý orí of the base form and replacing it withe,ě,y, oro.[50] Negative statements are formed by adding the affixne- to the main verb of a clause,[51] with one exception:je (he, she or it is) becomesnení.[52]
oni (masculine animate) ony (masculine inanimate, feminine) ona (neuter)
Because Czech usesgrammatical case to convey word function in a sentence (instead of relying onword order, as English does), its word order is flexible. As apro-drop language, in Czech anintransitive sentence can consist of only a verb; information about its subject is encoded in the verb.[53] Enclitics (primarilyauxiliary verbs and pronouns) appear in the second syntactic slot of a sentence, after the first stressed unit. The first slot can contain a subject or object, a main form of a verb, an adverb, or a conjunction (except for the light conjunctionsa, "and",i, "and even" orale, "but").[54]
Czech syntax has asubject–verb–object sentence structure. In practice, however, word order is flexible and used to distinguishtopic and focus, with the topic or theme (known referents) preceding the focus or rheme (new information) in a sentence; Czech has therefore been described as atopic-prominent language.[55] Although Czech has aperiphrasticpassive construction (like English), in colloquial style, word-order changes frequently replace the passive voice. For example, to change "Peter killed Paul" to "Paul was killed by Peter" the order of subject and object is inverted:Petr zabil Pavla ("Peter killed Paul") becomes "Paul, Peter killed" (Pavla zabil Petr).Pavla is in theaccusative case, the grammatical object of the verb.[56]
A word at the end of a clause is typically emphasized, unless an upwardintonation indicates that the sentence is a question:[57]
Pes jí bagetu. – The dog eats the baguette (rather than eating something else).
Bagetu jí pes. – The dog eats the baguette (rather than someone else doing so).
Pes bagetu jí. – The dog eats the baguette (rather than doing something else to it).
Jí pes bagetu? – Does the dog eat the baguette? (emphasis ambiguous)
In parts ofBohemia (includingPrague), questions such asJí pes bagetu? without an interrogative word (such asco, "what" orkdo, "who") areintoned in a slow rise from low to high, quickly dropping to low on the last word or phrase.[58]
In modern Czech syntax, adjectives precede nouns,[59] with few exceptions.[60]Relative clauses are introduced byrelativizers such as the adjectivekterý, analogous to the Englishrelative pronouns "which", "that" and "who"/"whom". As with other adjectives, itagrees with its associated noun in gender, number and case. Relative clauses follow the noun they modify. The following is aglossed example:[61]
In Czech, nouns and adjectives are declined into one of sevengrammatical cases which indicate their function in a sentence, twonumbers (singular and plural) and threegenders (masculine, feminine and neuter). The masculine gender is further divided intoanimate and inanimate classes.
A street sign in German (top) and Czech (bottom) for a street named afterBožena Němcová with her name declined in the genitive case in Czech (a sign probably from the time of theProtectorate).
Anominative–accusative language, Czech marks subject nouns of transitive and intransitive verbs in the nominative case, which is the form found in dictionaries, anddirect objects of transitive verbs are declined in the accusative case.[62] The vocative case is used to address people.[63] The remaining cases (genitive, dative, locative and instrumental) indicate semantic relationships, such asnoun adjuncts (genitive),indirect objects (dative), or agents in passive constructions (instrumental).[64] Additionallyprepositions and some verbs require their complements to be declined in a certain case.[62] The locative case is only used after prepositions.[65] An adjective's case agrees with that of the noun it modifies. When Czech children learn their language's declension patterns, the cases are referred to by number:[66]
Passive agents, instruments, prepositions of location
Some prepositions require the nouns they modify to take a particular case. The cases assigned by each preposition are based on the physical (or metaphorical) direction, or location, conveyed by it. For example,od (from, away from) andz (out of, off) assign the genitive case. Other prepositions take one of several cases, with their meaning dependent on the case;na means "on to" or "for" with the accusative case, but "on" with the locative.[67]
This is a glossed example of a sentence using several cases:
Czech distinguishes threegenders—masculine, feminine, and neuter—and the masculine gender is subdivided intoanimate and inanimate. With few exceptions, feminine nouns in the nominative case end in-a,-e, or a consonant; neuter nouns in-o,-e, or-í, and masculine nouns in a consonant.[68] Adjectives, participles, most pronouns, and the numbers "one" and "two" are marked for gender and agree with the gender of the noun they modify or refer to.[69] Past tense verbs are also marked for gender, agreeing with the gender of the subject, e.g.dělal (he did, or made);dělala (she did, or made) anddělalo (it did, or made).[70] Gender also plays a semantic role; most nouns that describe people and animals, including personal names, have separate masculine and feminine forms which are normally formed by adding a suffix to the stem, for exampleČech (Czech man) has the feminine formČeška (Czech woman).[71]
Nouns of different genders follow different declension patterns. Examples of declension patterns for noun phrases of various genders follow:
Nouns are also inflected fornumber, distinguishing between singular and plural. Typical of a Slavic language, Czech cardinal numbers one through four allow the nouns and adjectives they modify to take any case, but numbers over five require subject and direct object noun phrases to be declined in the genitive plural instead of the nominative or accusative, and when used as subjects these phrases take singular verbs. For example:[72]
English
Czech
one Czech crown was...
jedna koruna česká byla...
two Czech crowns were...
dvě koruny české byly...
three Czech crowns were...
tři koruny české byly...
four Czech crowns were...
čtyři koruny české byly...
five Czech crowns were...
pět korun českých bylo...
Numbers decline for case, and the numbers one and two are also inflected for gender. Numbers one through five are shown below as examples. The number one has declension patterns identical to those of thedemonstrative pronounten.[73][74]
1
2
3
4
5
Nominative
jeden (masc) jedna (fem) jedno (neut)
dva (masc) dvě (fem, neut)
tři
čtyři
pět
Genitive
jednoho (masc) jedné (fem) jednoho (neut)
dvou
tří ortřech
čtyř orčtyřech
pěti
Dative
jednomu (masc) jedné (fem) jednomu (neut)
dvěma
třem
čtyřem
pěti
Accusative
jednoho (masc an.) jeden (masc in.) jednu (fem) jedno (neut)
dva (masc) dvě (fem, neut)
tři
čtyři
pět
Locative
jednom (masc) jedné (fem) jednom (neut)
dvou
třech
čtyřech
pěti
Instrumental
jedním (masc) jednou (fem) jedním (neut)
dvěma
třemi
čtyřmi
pěti
Although Czech'sgrammatical numbers are singular andplural, several residuals ofdual forms remain, such as the wordsdva ("two") andoba ("both"), which decline the same way. Some nouns for paired body parts use a historical dual form to express plural in some cases:ruka (hand)—ruce (nominative);noha (leg)—nohama (instrumental),nohou (genitive/locative);oko (eye)—oči, anducho (ear)—uši. While two of these nouns are neuter in their singular forms, all plural forms are considered feminine; their gender is relevant to their associated adjectives and verbs.[75] These forms are plural semantically, used for any non-singular count, as inmezi čtyřma očima (face to face, lit.among four eyes). The plural number paradigms of these nouns are a mixture of historical dual and plural forms. For example,nohy (legs; nominative/accusative) is a standard plural form of this type of noun.[76]
Czech verbs agree with their subjects inperson (first, second or third),number (singular or plural), and in constructions involvingparticiples, which includes the past tense, also ingender. They are conjugated for tense (past, present orfuture) and mood (indicative,imperative orconditional). For example, the conjugated verbmluvíme (we speak) is in the present tense and first-person plural; it is distinguished from other conjugations of theinfinitivemluvit by its ending,-íme.[77] The infinitive form of Czech verbs ends in-t (archaically,-ti or-ci). It is the form found in dictionaries and the form that follows auxiliary verbs (for example,můžu tě slyšet—"I canhear you").[78]
Typical of Slavic languages, Czech marks its verbs for one of twogrammatical aspects:perfective andimperfective. Most verbs are part of inflected aspect pairs—for example,koupit (perfective) andkupovat (imperfective). Although the verbs' meaning is similar, in perfective verbs the action is completed and in imperfective verbs it is ongoing or repeated. This is distinct frompast andpresent tense.[79] Any verb of either aspect can be conjugated into either the past or present tense,[77] but the future tense is only used with imperfective verbs.[80] Aspect describes the state of the action at the time specified by the tense.[79]
The verbs of most aspect pairs differ in one of two ways: by prefix or by suffix. In prefix pairs, the perfective verb has an added prefix—for example, the imperfectivepsát (to write, to be writing) compared with the perfectivenapsat (to write down). The most common prefixes arena-,o-,po-,s-,u-,vy-,z- andza-.[81] In suffix pairs, a different infinitive ending is added to the perfective stem; for example, the perfective verbskoupit (to buy) andprodat (to sell) have the imperfective formskupovat andprodávat.[82] Imperfective verbs may undergo further morphology to make other imperfective verbs (iterative andfrequentative forms), denoting repeated or regular action. The verbjít (to go) has the iterative formchodit (to go regularly) and the frequentative formchodívat (to go occasionally; to tend to go).[83]
Many verbs have only one aspect, and verbs describing continual states of being—být (to be),chtít (to want),moct (to be able to),ležet (to lie down, to be lying down)—have no perfective form. Conversely, verbs describing immediate states of change—for example,otěhotnět (to become pregnant) andnadchnout se (to become enthusiastic)—have no imperfective aspect.[84]
The present tense in Czech is formed by adding an ending that agrees with the person and number of the subject at the end of the verb stem. As Czech is anull-subject language, the subject pronoun can be omitted unless it is needed for clarity.[85] The past tense is formed using aparticiple which ends in-l and a further ending which agrees with the gender and number of the subject. For the first and second persons, the auxiliary verbbýt conjugated in the present tense is added.[86]
In some contexts, the present tense of perfective verbs (which differs from the Englishpresent perfect) implies future action; in others, it connotes habitual action.[87] The perfective present is used to refer to completion of actions in the future and is distinguished from the imperfective future tense, which refers to actions that will be ongoing in the future. The future tense is regularly formed using the future conjugation ofbýt (as shown in the table on the left) and the infinitive of an imperfective verb, for example,budu jíst—"I will eat" or "I will be eating".[80] Wherebudu has a noun or adjective complement it means "I will be", for example,budu šťastný (I will be happy).[80] Some verbs of movement form their future tense by adding the prefixpo- to the present tense forms instead, e.g.jedu ("I go") >pojedu ("I will go").[88]
Czech verbs have threegrammatical moods:indicative,imperative andconditional.[89] The imperative mood is formed by adding specific endings for each of three person–number categories:-Ø/-i/-ej for second-person singular,-te/-ete/-ejte for second-person plural and-me/-eme/-ejme for first-person plural.[90] Imperatives are usually expressed using perfective verbs if positive and imperfective verbs if negative.[91] The conditional mood is formed with a conditionalauxiliary verb after the participle ending in -l which is used to form the past tense. This mood indicates hypothetical events and can also be used to express wishes.[92]
Most Czech verbs fall into one of fiveclasses, which determine their conjugation patterns. The future tense ofbýt would be classified as a Class I verb because of its endings. Examples of the present tense of each class and some common irregular verbs follow in the tables below:[93]
Czech has one of the mostphonemic orthographies of all European languages. Its alphabet contains 42graphemes, most of which correspond to individualphonemes,[94] and only contains onedigraph:ch, which followsh in the alphabet.[95] The charactersq,w andx appear only in foreign words.[96] Theháček (ˇ) is used with certain letters to form new characters:š,ž, andč, as well asň,ě,ř,ť, andď (the latter five uncommon outside Czech). The last two letters are sometimes written with a comma above (ʼ, an abbreviated háček) because of their height.[97] Czech orthography has influenced the orthographies of other Balto-Slavic languages and some of its characters have been adopted fortransliteration of Cyrillic.[98]
Czech orthography reflectsvowel length; long vowels are indicated by anacute accent or, in the case of the characterů, aring. Longu is usually writtenú at the beginning of a word or morpheme (úroda,neúrodný) andů in the middle,[99] except for loanwords (skútr) or onomatopoeia (bú).[100] Long vowels andě are not considered separate letters in the alphabetical order.[101] The characteró exists only in loanwords andonomatopoeia.[102]
Czechtypographical features not associated with phonetics generally resemble those of most European languages that use theLatin script, including English.Proper nouns,honorifics, and the first letters of quotations arecapitalized, andpunctuation is typical of other Latin European languages. Ordinal numbers (1st) use a point, as in German (1.). The Czech language uses a decimal comma instead of a decimal point. When writing a long number, spaces between every three digits, including those in decimal places, may be used for better orientation in handwritten texts. The number 1,234,567.89101 may be written as 1234567,89101 or 1 234 567,891 01.[103] Inproper noun phrases (except personal and settlement names), only the first word and proper nouns inside such phrases are capitalized (Pražský hrad,Prague Castle).[104][105]
Josef Jungmann, whose Czech–German dictionary laid the foundations for modern Standard Czech
The modern literary standard and prestige variety, known as "Standard Czech" (spisovná čeština) is based on the standardization during theCzech National Revival in the 1830s, significantly influenced byJosef Jungmann's Czech–German dictionary published during 1834–1839. Jungmann used vocabulary of theBible of Kralice (1579–1613) period and of the language used by his contemporaries. He borrowed words not present in Czech from other Slavic languages or created neologisms.[106] Standard Czech is the formal register of the language which is used in official documents, formal literature, newspaper articles, education and occasionally public speeches.[107] It is codified by theCzech Language Institute, who publish occasional reforms to the codification. The most recent reform took place in 1993.[108] The termhovorová čeština (lit.'Colloquial Czech') is sometimes used to refer to the spoken variety of standard Czech.[109]
The most widely spoken vernacular form of the language is called "Common Czech" (obecná čeština), aninterdialect influenced by spoken Standard Czech and the Central Bohemian dialects of thePrague region. Other Bohemian regional dialects have become marginalized, whileMoravian dialects remain more widespread and diverse, with a political movement for Moravian linguistic revival active since the 1990s.
These varieties of the language (Standard Czech, spoken/colloquial Standard Czech, Common Czech, and regional dialects) form astylistic continuum, in which contact between varieties of a similar prestige influences change within them.[110]
Dialects of Czech,Moravian,Lach, andCieszyn Silesian spoken in the Czech Republic. The border areas, where German was formerly spoken, are now mixed.
The main Czech vernacular, spoken primarily inBohemia including the capitalPrague, is known as Common Czech (obecná čeština). This is an academic distinction; most Czechs are unaware of the term or associate it with deformed or "incorrect" Czech.[111] Compared to Standard Czech, Common Czech is characterized by simpler inflection patterns and differences in sound distribution.[112]
Common Czech is distinguished from spoken/colloquial Standard Czech (hovorová čeština), which is astylistic variety within standard Czech.[113][114]Tomasz Kamusella defines the spoken variety of Standard Czech as a compromise between Common Czech and the written standard,[115] whileMiroslav Komárek calls Common Czech an intersection of spoken Standard Czech and regional dialects.[116]
Common Czech has become ubiquitous in most parts of the Czech Republic since the later 20th century. It is usually defined as aninterdialect used in common speech inBohemia and western parts ofMoravia (by about two thirds of all inhabitants of theCzech Republic). Common Czech is notcodified, but some of its elements have become adopted in the written standard. Since the second half of the 20th century, Common Czech elements have also been spreading to regions previously unaffected, as a consequence of media influence. Standard Czech is still the norm for politicians, businesspeople and other Czechs in formal situations, but Common Czech is gaining ground in journalism and the mass media.[112] The colloquial form of Standard Czech finds limited use in daily communication due to the expansion of the Common Czech interdialect.[113] It is sometimes defined as a theoretical construct rather than an actual tool of colloquial communication, since in casual contexts, the non-standard interdialect is preferred.[113]
Common Czechphonology is based on that of the Central Bohemian dialect group, which has a slightly different set of vowel phonemes to Standard Czech.[116] The phoneme /ɛː/ is peripheral and usually merges with /iː/, e.g. inmalý město (small town),plamínek (little flame) andlítat (to fly), and a second native diphthong /ɛɪ̯/ occurs, usually in places where Standard Czech has /iː/, e.g.malej dům (small house),mlejn (mill),plejtvat (to waste),bejt (to be).[117] In addition, a protheticv- is added to most words beginning witho-, such asvotevřítvokno (to open the window).[118]
Non-standardmorphological features that are more or less common among all Common Czech speakers include:[118]
unifiedpluralendings ofadjectives:malý lidi (small people),malý ženy (small women),malý města (small towns) – standard:malí lidé, malé ženy, malá města;
unifiedinstrumentalending-ma inplural:s těma dobrejma lidma, ženama, chlapama, městama (with the good people, women, guys, towns) – standard:s těmi dobrými lidmi, ženami, chlapy, městy. In essence, this form resembles the form of thedual, which was once a productive form, but now is almost extinct and retained in a lexically specific set of words. In Common Czech the ending became productive again around the 17th century, but used as a substitute for a regular plural form.[119]
omission of the syllabic-l in the masculine ending of past tense verbs:řek (he said),moh (he could),pích (he pricked) – standard:řekl, mohl, píchl.
tendency of merging the locative singular masculine/neuter for adjectives with the instrumental by changing the locative ending-ém to-ým and then shortening the vowel:mladém (standard locative),mladým (standard instrumental) >mladým (Common Czech locative),mladym (Common Czech instrumental) >mladym (Common Czech locative/instrumental with shortening).[120]
Examples of declension (Standard Czech is added in italics for comparison):
Masculine animate
Masculine inanimate
Feminine
Neuter
Sg.
Nominative
mladej člověk mladý člověk
mladej stát mladý stát
mladá žena mladá žena
mladý zvíře mladé zvíře
Genitive
mladýho člověka mladého člověka
mladýho státu mladého státu
mladý ženy mladé ženy
mladýho zvířete mladého zvířete
Dative
mladýmu člověkovi mladému člověku
mladýmu státu mladému státu
mladý ženě mladé ženě
mladýmu zvířeti mladému zvířeti
Accusative
mladýho člověka mladého člověka
mladej stát mladý stát
mladou ženu mladou ženu
mladý zvíře mladé zvíře
Vocative
mladej člověče! mladý člověče!
mladej státe! mladý státe!
mladá ženo! mladá ženo!
mladý zvíře! mladé zvíře!
Locative
mladým člověkovi mladém člověkovi
mladým státě mladém státě
mladý ženě mladé ženě
mladým zvířeti mladém zvířeti
Instrumental
mladym člověkem mladým člověkem
mladym státem mladým státem
mladou ženou mladou ženou
mladym zvířetem mladým zvířetem
Pl.
Nominative
mladý lidi mladí lidé
mladý státy mladé státy
mladý ženy mladé ženy
mladý zvířata mladá zvířata
Genitive
mladejch lidí mladých lidí
mladejch států mladých států
mladejch žen mladých žen
mladejch zvířat mladých zvířat
Dative
mladejm lidem mladým lidem
mladejm státům mladým státům
mladejm ženám mladým ženám
mladejm zvířatům mladým zvířatům
Accusative
mladý lidi mladé lidi
mladý státy mladé státy
mladý ženy mladé ženy
mladý zvířata mladá zvířata
Vocative
mladý lidi! mladí lidé!
mladý státy! mladé státy!
mladý ženy! mladé ženy!
mladý zvířata! mladá zvířata!
Locative
mladejch lidech mladých lidech
mladejch státech mladých státech
mladejch ženách mladých ženách
mladejch zvířatech mladých zvířatech
Instrumental
mladejma lidma mladými lidmi
mladejma státama mladými státy
mladejma ženama mladými ženami
mladejma zvířatama mladými zvířaty
mladý člověk – young man/person, mladí lidé – young people, mladý stát – young state, mladá žena – young woman, mladé zvíře – young animal
Apart from the Common Czech vernacular, there remain a variety of other Bohemian dialects, mostly in marginal rural areas. Dialect use began to weaken in the second half of the 20th century, and by the early 1990s regional dialect use was stigmatized, associated with the shrinking lower class and used in literature or other media for comedic effect. Increased travel and media availability to dialect-speaking populations has encouraged them to shift to (or add to their own dialect) Standard Czech.[121]
Traditional territory of the main dialect groups of Moravia and Czech Silesia. Green: Central Moravian, Red: East Moravian, Yellow:Lach (Silesian), Pink:Cieszyn Silesian, Orange: Bohemian–Moravian transitional dialects, Purple: Mixed areas
The Czech dialects spoken inMoravia andSilesia are known asMoravian (moravština). In theAustro-Hungarian Empire, "Bohemian-Moravian-Slovak" was a language citizens could register as speaking (with German, Polish and several others).[123] In the 2011 census, where respondents could optionally specify up to two first languages,[124] 62,908 Czech citizens specified Moravian as their first language and 45,561 specified both Moravian and Czech.[125]
Beginning in the sixteenth century, some varieties of Czech resembled Slovak;[14] the southeastern Moravian dialects form a continuum between the Czech and Slovak languages,[126] using the same declension patterns for nouns and pronouns and the same verb conjugations as Slovak.[127]
A popular misconception holds that eastern Moravian dialects are closer to Slovak than Czech, but this is incorrect; in fact, the opposite is true, and certain dialects in far western Slovakia exhibit features more akin to standard Czech than to standard Slovak.[8]
Czech and Slovak have been consideredmutually intelligible; speakers of either language can communicate with greater ease than those of any other pair of West Slavic languages.[129] Following the 1993dissolution of Czechoslovakia, mutual intelligibility declined for younger speakers, probably because Czech speakers began to experience less exposure to Slovak and vice versa.[130] A 2015 study involving participants with a mean age of around 23 nonetheless concluded that there remained a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages.[129] Grammatically, both languages share a common syntax.[14]
One study showed that Czech and Slovaklexicons differed by 80 percent, but this high percentage was found to stem primarily from differing orthographies and slight inconsistencies in morphological formation;[131] Slovak morphology is more regular (when changing from thenominative to thelocative case,Praha becomesPraze in Czech andPrahe in Slovak). The two lexicons are generally considered similar, with most differences found in colloquial vocabulary and some scientific terminology. Slovak has slightly more borrowed words than Czech.[14]
The similarities between Czech and Slovak led to the languages being considered a single language by a group of 19th-century scholars who called themselves "Czechoslavs" (Čechoslované), believing that the peoples were connected in a way which excludedGerman Bohemians and (to a lesser extent)Hungarians and other Slavs.[132] During theFirst Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938), although "Czechoslovak" was designated as the republic's official language, both Czech and Slovak written standards were used. Standard written Slovak was partially modeled on literary Czech, and Czech was preferred for some official functions in the Slovak half of the republic. Czech influence on Slovak was protested by Slovak scholars, and when Slovakia broke off from Czechoslovakia in 1938 as theSlovak State (which then aligned withNazi Germany inWorld War II), literary Slovak was deliberately distanced from Czech. When theAxis powers lost the war and Czechoslovakia reformed, Slovak developed somewhat on its own (with Czech influence); during thePrague Spring of 1968, Slovak gained independence from (and equality with) Czech,[14] due to the transformation of Czechoslovakia from a unitary state to a federation. Since the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, "Czechoslovak" has referred to improvisedpidgins of the languages which have arisen from the decrease in mutual intelligibility.[133]
Czech vocabulary derives primarily from Slavic, Baltic and other Indo-European roots. Although most verbs have Balto-Slavic origins, pronouns, prepositions and some verbs have wider, Indo-European roots.[134] Some loanwords have been restructured byfolk etymology to resemble native Czech words (e.g.hřbitov, "graveyard" andlistina, "list").[135]
Most Czech loanwords originated in one of two time periods. Earlier loanwords, primarily from German,[136]Greek and Latin,[137] arrived before the Czech National Revival. More recent loanwords derive primarily from English andFrench,[136] and also fromHebrew,Arabic andPersian. Many Russian loanwords, principally animal names and naval terms, also exist in Czech.[138]
Although older German loanwords were colloquial, recent borrowings from other languages are associated with high culture.[136] During the nineteenth century, words with Greek and Latin roots were rejected in favor of those based on older Czech words and common Slavic roots; "music" ismuzyka in Polish andмузыка (muzyka) in Russian, but in Czech it ishudba.[137] Some Czech words have been borrowed as loanwords intoEnglish and other languages—for example,robot (fromrobota, "labor")[139] andpolka (frompolka, "Polish woman" or from "půlka" "half").[140]
Všichni lidé rodí se svobodní a sobě rovní co do důstojnosti a práv. Jsou nadáni rozumem a svědomím a mají spolu jednat v duchu bratrství.[141]
Article 1 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights in English:
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.[142]
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