Czech Technical Translation

About the Czech Language

Czech is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, spoken by over 10 million people. It is the official language of the Czech Republic, and is closely related to Slovak, to the point of mutual intelligibility to a very high degree. Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German.

Standard Czech contains ten basic vowel phonemes, and three diphthongs. The vowels are /a/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /o/, and /u/, and their long counterparts /aː/, /ɛː/, /iː/, /oː/ and /uː/. The diphthongs are /ou̯/, /au̯/ and /ɛu̯/; the last two are found only in loanwords such as auto "car" and euro "euro". Vowels are never reduced to schwa sounds when unstressed. In Czech orthography, the vowels are spelled as follows:

• Short: a, e/ě, i/y, o, u
• Long: á, é, í/ý, ó, ú/ů
• Diphthongs: ou, au, eu

The letter ě indicates that the previous consonant is palatalised (e.g. něco /ɲɛtso/), měkký /mɲɛkiː/). After a labial it represents /jɛ/ (e.g. běs /bjɛs/). Each word usually has primary stress on its first syllable, except for enclitics (minor, monosyllabic, unstressed syllables). In all words of more than two syllables, every odd-numbered syllable receives secondary stress. Stress is unrelated to vowel length, and the possibility of stressed short vowels and unstressed long vowels can be confusing to students whose native language combines the features (such as most varieties of English). When a word is preceded by a monosyllabic preposition, the stress moves to the preposition, e.g. do Prahy "to Prague".

Voiced consonants with unvoiced counterparts are unvoiced at the end of a word before a pause, and in consonant clusters voicing assimilation occurs, which matches voicing to the following consonant. The unvoiced counterpart of /ɦ/ is /x/.