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Linguistics

History

Czech ['ʧɛk] (čeština ['ʧɛʃ.cɪ.na]) 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 very close to Slovak and, to a lesser degree, to Polish. Most adult Czechs and Slovaks are able to understand each other without difficulty as they were routinely exposed to both languages on the national TV and radio until the splitting of Czechoslovakia. People born after circa 1985 may have difficulty grasping the few words that differ significantly, or understanding fast spoken language.

Because of its complexity, Czech is said to be one of the most difficult languages to learn[citation needed]. The complexity is due to extensive morphology and highly free word order. As in all Slavic languages (except 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: Češi udělali revoluci (The Czechs made a revolution), Revoluci udělali Češi (It was the Czechs who made the revolution), and Češi revoluci udělali (The Czechs did make a revolution).