Translations and Other Language Solutions in Czech Language

Czech belongs to the Slavic languages of the Indo-European language family, and it has more than 11.5 million speakers around the globe. It is the oldest of all Slavic languages. Czech is the official language of the Czech Republic, but it is also spoken in the USA, Austria, Canada, Slovakia, and Germany. Czech is also one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. 96% of the Czech Republic’s population speaks Czech.

The Czech language has three main dialect groups: Czech, Hanakian, and Lach, which are further divided into subgroups. There are four dialects: Bohemian, Cieszyn Silesian (spoken in southern Poland and sometimes considered a Polish dialect with strong Czech influences), Moravian, and Silesian.

The origins of Czech date back to around the 10th century when, just like other Slavic languages, it started to split off from the old Slavic parent language.

Until the end of the 13th century, Czechs used the Latin alphabet without any modifications; however, to accommodate the growing volume of texts, they developed a writing system that allowed them to represent intrinsically Czech sounds with no equivalents in the Latin alphabet more accurately. It was introduced in the early 15th century. For several centuries both digraphs (pairs of letters representing the same sound) and letters with diacritical marks were used. Diacritical marks are still used in the Czech language today, while the only remaining digraph is ‘ch’.

The literary Czech language developed during the 14th–16th centuries on the basis of the Middle Czech, or Prague, dialect, but it was during the 18th century that it flourished into what we know it for today.

The first book in Czech was already printed in 1468, which is also the very first book in any of the Slavic languages. The first grammar book was published in 1533. After the suppression of the reformation movement in the 17th century, Latin re-established itself as the primary language in Czech writing. Books in Czech were destroyed, and the secretly published texts were rewritten as manuscripts.

Due to historic reasons, the Czech Republic’s legislation regarding the use of language in the country is rather strict: both the official and mass media communication shall be in Czech only. Efficient Czech language learning programmes are offered to non-residents in all of the biggest cities for a symbolic fee. Only a few national universities and separate faculties (natural and technical sciences) offer studying in English.