About the Czech language
Czech is one of the West Slavic languages, along with Slovak and Polish. 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 relatively close to Slovak and, to a lesser degree, to Polish. It had developed into a separate language by the first half of the 12th century. From the second half of the 17th century to the second third of the 18th century Czech language gradually disappeared from science, literature and administration. Only the spoken language continued its development in the country. During the Czech National Revival following the abolition of serfdom in 1781 the Czech language was awakened again by Czech enlightened intelligentsia. The literary language of the end of the 16th century and of Komenský’s (Comenius) work became the starting point for the new codification of literary Czech.
As in most Slavic languages many words have many forms. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numbers are declined (7 cases over a number of declension models) and verbs are conjugated; the other parts of speech are not inflected. 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.
The phonology of Czech may also be very difficult for speakers of other languages. For example, some words do not appear to have vowels: zmrzl (froze solid), ztvrdl (hardened), scvrkl (shrunk), blb (fool), vlk (wolf), and smrt (death). A popular example of this is the phrase strč prst skrz krk meaning stick a finger through your throat. The consonants l and r function instead of vowels in these one-syllable words. In Czech there is the consonant ř, a phoneme that is said to be unique to Czech and quite difficult for foreigners to pronounce, as well as for some Czech native speakers. Many Czech pre-school children cannot pronounce ř; one of the ways to learn it recommended by speech therapists is: first pucker the lips and then whisper a word containing r sound several times, begin e.g. with the English word tree; after a while, r will become ř, and you will learn to pronounce the Czech word tři (three). There are 10 vowels in Czech, 5 short and 5 long vowels. Long vowels are indicated by an acute accent or a ring: í and ý, ú and ů, é, á, ó. As for consonants, apart from ř, there is also š /ʃ/, ž /ʒ/ , č /ʧ/, ň, ť and ď . The accents for long vowels and for soft consonants were introduced in 1406 by Jan Hus, a Czech religious thinker, philosopher and reformer. Unlike in other languages, ch /x/ is a diagraph, coming in the Czech alphabet between h and i.
In the Czech Republic two distinct variants of spoken Czech can be found, both corresponding more or less to geographic areas within the country. The first, and most widely used, is Common Czech, spoken especially in Bohemia. The second major variant is spoken in Moravia and Silesia. Nowadays it is very close to the Bohemian form of Common Czech. Unlike in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia tend to have more local dialects varying from place to place, however just as in Bohemia, most have been already heavily influenced and mostly replaced by Common Czech.