Czech language

Czech is one of the West Slavic languages, along with Slovak, Polish, Pomeranian (Kashubian), and Lusatian Sorbian. It is spoken by most people in the Czech Republic and by Czechs all over the world (about 12 million native speakers in total). Czech is quite close to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser degree, to Polish or to Sorbian in East Germany. As for the relation between Czech and Slovak, speakers of these languages usually understand the other language pretty well both in its written and spoken form and together they constitute kind of language diasystem, though some dialects or heavily accented speech might present difficulties to them (in particular, geographically most distant Eastern Slovak dialects to Czech speakers). Younger generations of Czechs who grew up after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 and therefore tend to be less familiar with Slovak might also have some problems with a certain amount of words and expressions which differ considerably in the two languages.

As in most Slavic languages (except common nouns in modern Bulgarian and Macedonian), many words (especially nouns, verbs and adjectives) have many forms (inflections). In this regard, Czech and the Slavic languages are closer to their Indo-European origins than other languages in the same family that have lost much inflection. Moreover, in Czech the rules of morphology are extremely irregular and many forms have official, colloquial and sometimes semi-official variants. The word order serves similar function as emphasis and articles in English. Often all the permutations of words in a clause are possible. While the permutations mostly share the same meaning, it is nevertheless different, because the permutations differ in the topic-focus articulation. As an example we can show: Ceši udelali revoluci (The Czechs made a revolution), Revoluci udelali Ceši (It was the Czechs who made the revolution), and Ceši revoluci udelali (The Czechs did make a revolution).

The phonology of Czech may also be very difficult for speakers of other languages. For example, some words do not appear to have vowels: zmrzl (froze solid), ztvrdl (hardened), scvrkl (shrunk), ctvrthrst (quarter-handful), blb (fool), vlk (wolf), or smrt (death). A popular example of this is the phrase "strc prst skrz krk" meaning "stick a finger through your throat" or "Smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh." meaning "Morel full of spots dampened from fogs". The consonants l and r can function as the nucleus of a syllable in Czech, since they are sonorant consonants. A similar phenomenon also occurs in American English, where the reduced syllables at the ends of "butter" and "bottle" are pronounced [b?.??] and [b?.?l], with syllabic consonants as syllable nuclei. It also features the consonant r, a phoneme that is said to be unique to Czech and quite difficult for foreigners to pronounce. To a foreign ear, it sounds very similar to zh, though a better approximation could be rolled (trilled) r combined with zh, which was incidentally sometimes used as an orthography for this sound (rž) for example in the royal charter of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1609. The phonetic description of the sound is "a raised alveolar non-sonorant vibrant" which can be either voiceless (terminally or next to a voiceless consonant) or voiced (elsewhere), the IPA transcription being [ r? ], however this is contested as not representing the r sound properly.