A Few Things Unique to the Czech Language

By Sarah-Claire Jordan

As Americans, many of us know very little about the Czech Republic. Most probably know about how it used to form part of Czechoslovakia, and how that state was peacefully divided into what is now the Czech Republic and Slovakia. If you take a look at its history, you will see that it once was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which dissolved shortly after World War I.

The Czech language, however, was around centuries before the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though it was Old Czech back then. Besides that, there are many aspects of the Czech language that set it apart from others even in the same area of Europe:

Czech used to have high mutual intelligibility with Slovak

This is very much rooted in the history of Czechoslovakia and the relationship between Czech and Slavic speakers before and after the creation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. When Czechoslovakia still existed, Czech and Slavic were very mutually intelligible. Afterwards, however, mutual intelligibility has decreased, mostly for younger speakers on both sides. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Slavic and Czech speakers are not as exposed to each other. Regardless, the two languages remain the two most similar languages of the West Slavic language group, to the point where they both form part of a dialect continuum.

Czech is taught in some schools in the United States

There was a wave of Czech immigration to the U.S. between 1848 and 1914, during which many Czech immigrants ended up settling in states such as Nebraska, Texas, and even Wisconsin. To this day, there is still a huge influence of the Czech language in areas where it is spoken by descendants of these immigrants. There are Czech community centers that provide Czech Americans with a place to meet up, learn, and share their heritage. In some communities, Czech is offered as a second language, along with Spanish, French, and German. There were 70,500 Americans who spoke Czech as their native language as of 2009.

Czech has one of the most phonemic orthographies of all languages

This may sound like linguistic mumbo jumbo, but all it really means is that the symbols used to represent the sounds (orthography) of the Czech language correspond to these sounds (phonemes). English, for example, is notorious for having an orthography that is not very phonemic, which makes it harder for non-native speakers to learn English spelling. Czech characters, on the other hand, have long been a favorite of phonologists as they can use them to represent the same or similar sounds in other languages.

Czech has seven grammatical cases

A grammatical case is something very foreign to native English speakers, but those who speak German, Russian, and many other languages will have a good idea of what they are. In Czech, adjectives and nouns as well as other types of words have 14 different forms, depending on which grammatical case they are being used in. This means that the word for “cat” is modified depending on the way it is used (as the subject, indirect object, belonging, etc) in a sentence. Czech has a particularly complex case system, making it a bit more difficult to master.

Category: Foreign Language