Czech language

"Čeština" redirects here. For other uses, see Cestina.

Czech
čeština, český jazyk
Native toCzech Republic
EthnicityCzechs
Native speakers
10.6 million (2015)[1]
Dialects
Official status
Official language in
Recognised minority
language in
Regulated byInstitute of the Czech Language
(of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)
Language codes
ISO 639-1cs
ISO 639-2cze (B)
ces (T)
ISO 639-3ces
Glottologczec1258
Linguasphere53-AAA-da < 53-AAA-b...-d
(varieties: 53-AAA-daa to 53-AAA-dam)
IETFcs[4]
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Czech (/tʃɛk/ CHEK; endonym: čeština [ˈtʃɛʃcɪna]), historically also known as Bohemian[5] (/boʊˈhiːmiən, bə-/ boh-HEE-mee-ən, bə-;[6] Latin: lingua Bohemica), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script.[5] Spoken by over 10 million people, it serves as the official language of the Czech Republic. Czech is closely related to Slovak, to the point of high mutual intelligibility, as well as to Polish to a lesser degree.[7] Czech is a fusional language with a rich system of morphology and relatively flexible word order. Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German.

The Czech–Slovak group developed within West Slavic in the high 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 the Czech National Revival. The most widely spoken non-standard variety, known as Common Czech, is based on the vernacular of Prague, but is now spoken as an interdialect throughout most of Bohemia. The Moravian dialects spoken in Moravia and Czech Silesia are considerably more varied than the dialects of Bohemia.[8]

Czech has a moderately-sized phoneme inventory, comprising ten monophthongs, three diphthongs and 25 consonants (divided into "hard", "neutral" and "soft" categories). Words may contain complicated consonant clusters or lack vowels altogether. Czech has a raised alveolar trill, which is known to occur as a phoneme in only a few other languages, represented by the grapheme ř.

  1. ^ Czech at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ a b c d e "Full list". Council of Europe.
  3. ^ Ministry of Interior of Poland: Act of 6 January 2005 on national and ethnic minorities and on the regional languages
  4. ^ IANA language subtag registry, retrieved October 15, 2018
  5. ^ a b "Czech language". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 6 January 2015.
  6. ^ Jones, Daniel (2003) [1917], Peter Roach; James Hartmann; Jane Setter (eds.), English Pronouncing Dictionary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-3-12-539683-8
  7. ^ Swan, Oscar E. (2002). A grammar of contemporary Polish. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica. p. 5. ISBN 0893572969. OCLC 50064627.
  8. ^ Rejzek, Jiří (2021). Zrození češtiny (in Czech). Prague: Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakulta. pp. 102, 130. ISBN 978-80-7422-799-8.