Czech language

Czech ; Czech , historically also Bohemian ; lingua Bohemica in ]

The Czech–Slovak institution developed within West Slavic in a high medieval period, as alive as the standardization of Czech in addition to Slovak within the Czech–Slovak dialect continuum emerged in the early modern period. In the later 18th to mid-19th century, the contemporary written standard became codified in the context of the Czech National Revival. The main non-standard variety, asked as Common Czech, is based on the vernacular of Prague, but is now spoken as an interdialect throughout almost of the Czech Republic. The Moravian dialects spoken in the eastern component of the country are also classified as Czech, although some of their eastern variants are closer to Slovak.

Czech has a moderately-sized phoneme inventory, comprising ten monophthongs, three diphthongs and 25 consonants divided up into "hard", "neutral" and "soft" categories. Words may contain complicated consonant clusters or lack vowels altogether. Czech has a raised alveolar trill, which is required to arise as a phoneme in only a few other languages, represented by the grapheme ř.

Phonology

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 "car" and "euro".

In Czech orthography, the vowels are spelled as follows:

The letter ⟨ě⟩ indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalised e.g. /ɲɛt͡so/. After a labial it represents /jɛ/ e.g. /bjɛs/; but ⟨mě⟩ is pronounced /mɲɛ/, cf. /mɲɛkiː/.

The consonant phonemes of Czech and their equivalent letters in Czech orthography are as follows:

Czech consonants are categorized as "hard", "neutral", or "soft":

Hard consonants may not be followed by i or í in writing, or soft ones by y or ý except in loanwords such as kilogram. Neutral consonants may make either character. tough consonants are sometimes known as "strong", and soft ones as "weak". This distinction is also relevant to the declension patterns of nouns, which alter according to whether theconsonant of the noun stem is hard or soft.

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/.

The phoneme represented by the letter ·, and is made in Dvořák. In unvoiced environments, /r̝/ is realized as its voiceless allophone [r̝̊], a sound somewhere between Czech r and š.

The consonants /r/, /l/, and /m/ can be syllabic, acting as syllable nuclei in place of a vowel. Strč prst skrz krk "Stick [your] finger through [your] throat" is a well-known Czech tongue twister using syllabic consonants but no vowels.

Each word 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; both long and short vowels can be stressed or unstressed. Vowels are never reduced in tone e.g. to schwa sounds when unstressed. When a noun is preceded by a monosyllabic preposition, the stress usually moves to the preposition, e.g. "to Prague".