Czech Voice Over Agency

Czech formerly known as Bohemian (/bəʊˈhiːmɪən/; lingua Bohemica in Latin), is a West Slavic language spoken by over 10 million people. It is the official language in the Czech Republic (where most of its speakers live), and has minority language status in Slovakia. Czech’s closest relative is Slovak, with which it is mutually intelligible. It is closely related to other West Slavic languages, such as Silesian and Polish, and more distantly to East Slavic languages such as Russian. Although most Czech vocabulary is based on shared roots with Slavic and other Indo-European languages, many loanwords (most associated with high culture) have been adopted in recent years.

The language began in its present linguistic branch as Old Czech before slowly dwindling in importance, dominated by German in the Czech lands. During the mid-eighteenth century, it experienced a revival in which Czech academics stressed the past accomplishments of their people and advocated the return of Czech as a major language. It has changed little since this time, except for minor morphological shifts and the formalization of colloquial elements.

Its phoneme inventory is moderate in size, comprising five vowels (each short or long) and twenty-five consonants (divided into “hard”, “neutral” and “soft” categories). Words may contain uncommon (or complicated) consonant clusters, including one consonant represented by the grapheme ř, or lack vowels altogether. Czech orthography is simple, and has been used as a model by phonologists.

As a member of the Slavic sub-family of the Indo-European languages, Czech is a highly inflected fusional language. Its nouns and adjectives undergo a complex system of declension for case, number, gender, animacy and type of ending consonant (hard, neutral or soft). Verbs (with aspect) are conjugated somewhat more simply for tense, number and gender. Because of this inflection, Czech word order is very flexible and words may be transposed to change emphasis or form questions.

Czech is classified as a member of the West Slavic sub-branch of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. This branch includes Polish, Kashubian, Upper and Lower Sorbian and Slovak. Slovak is by far the closest genetic neighbor of Czech, and the languages are closer than any other pair of West Slavic languages (including Upper and Lower Sorbian, which share a name by association with an ethnic group).

The West Slavic languages are spoken in an area classified as part of Central Europe. Except for Polish they differ from East and South Slavic languages by their initial-syllable stress, and from other West Slavic languages by a more-restricted distinction between “hard” and “soft” consonants.

Czech and Slovak have been considered mutually intelligible; speakers of either language can communicate with greater ease than those of any other pair of West Slavic languages. Since the dissolution of Czechoslovakia mutual intelligibility has declined for younger speakers, probably because Czech speakers now experience less exposure to Slovak and vice versa.

The languages have not undergone the deliberate highlighting of minor linguistic differences in the name of nationalism as has occurred in the Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian standards of Serbo-Croatian. However, most Slavic languages (including Czech) have been distanced in this way from Russian influences because of widespread public resentment against the former Soviet Union (which occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968). Czech and Slovak form a dialect continuum, with great similarity between neighboring Czech and Slovak dialects. (see “Dialects” below).

In phonetic differences, Czech is characterized by a glottal stop before initial vowels and Slovak by its less-frequent use of long vowels than Czech; however, Slovak has long forms of the consonants r and l when they function as vowels. Phonemic differences between the two languages are generally consistent, typical of two dialects of a language. Grammatically, although Czech (unlike Slovak) has a vocative case both languages share a common syntax.

One study showed that Czech and Slovak lexicons differed by 80 percent, but this high percentage was found to stem primarily from differing orthographies and slight inconsistencies in morphological formation; Slovak morphology is more regular (when changing from the nominative to the locative case, Praha becomes Praze in Czech and Prahe in Slovak). The two lexicons are generally considered similar, with most differences in colloquial vocabulary and some scientific terminology. Slovak has slightly more borrowed words than Czech.

The similarities between Czech and Slovak led to the languages being considered a single language by a group of 19th-century scholars who called themselves “Czechoslavs” (Čechoslováci), believing that the peoples were connected in a way which excluded German Bohemians and (to a lesser extent) Hungarians and other Slavs. During the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938), although “Czechoslovak” was designated as the republic’s official language both Czech and Slovak written standards were used. Standard written Slovak was partially modeled on literary Czech, and Czech was preferred for some official functions in the Slovak half of the republic. Czech influence on Slovak was protested by Slovak scholars, and when Slovakia broke off from Czechoslovakia in 1938 as the Slovak State (which then aligned with Nazi Germany in World War II) literary Slovak was deliberately distanced from Czech. When the Axis powers lost the war and Czechoslovakia reformed, Slovak developed somewhat on its own (with Czech influence); during the Prague Spring of 1968, Slovak gained independence from (and equality with) Czech. Since then, “Czechoslovak” refers to improvised pidgins of the languages which have arisen from the decrease in mutual intelligibility.