Czech language
The Czech language is one of the West Slavic languages, along with Slovak, Polish, Pomeranian, and 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 (čeština) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Czech Republic |
| Region: | -- |
| Total speakers: | 12 Millions |
| Ranking: | 73 |
| Genetic classification: | Indo-European Slavic West Czech-Slovak Czech |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Czech Republic |
| Regulated by: | Czech Language Institute |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1: | cs |
| ISO 639-2(B): | cze |
| ISO 639-2(T): | ces |
| SIL: | CZC |
Because of its complexity Czech is said to be a difficult language to learn. The complexity is due to extensive morphology (some words have over two hundred possible word forms) and highly free word order (often all the permutations of words in a clause are valid). It shares these features with other Slavonic languages such as Russian.
Czech's phonology may also be very difficult for speakers of many other languages. For example, some words do not appear to have vowels: zmrzl, ztvrdl, scvrnkl, čtvrthrst. The consonants l and r, however, function as sonorants and thus fulfill the role of a vowel. It also features the consonant ř, a phoneme that is said to be unique to Czech and quite difficult for foreigners to pronounce.
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The cases of Czech are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, locative, and vocative. The numbers are singular, plural, and remains of dual. The genders are masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter.
See also: Czech alphabet, hacek
Morphology
Parts of speech
Only nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numbers and verbs have inflections or declensions; remaining kinds have no morphology.
Flexible kinds have additional morphological attributes.Declension
External links