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Czech language, in the past sometimes also called Bohemian, member of the West Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the
Indo-European family of languages. The official language of the Czech Republic, it is spoken by about 11 million people, of
whom over 10 million reside there and close to 1 million of whom are in Slovakia and North America combined.
Grammatically, Czech has seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental, and vocative)
for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. It is not necessary to use personal pronouns with verbs since the verb endings clearly
show person and number; however, personal pronouns may be used for emphasis. In the pronunciation of Czech, the stress always
falls on the first syllable of a word, but diacritical marks such as accents do not show this accentuation. A sharp distinction
is made between long and short vowels, and an acute accent (´) is used to indicate where vowels are lengthened, i.e., where
their pronunciation is relatively protracted. A hook or inverted circumflex over a consonant is the sign that the consonant
is palatalized, or pronounced with the tip of the tongue on the palate.
The earliest surviving record of Czech is in the form of glosses in a Latin manuscript of the 11th cent. AD The period
of Old Czech, the oldest stage of the language, is usually placed in the 11th to 14th cents. At that time there were many
dialects. A Czech literature began to take shape in the 13th cent. Standardization of the spelling and pronunciation of the
language occurred during the Middle Czech period of the 15th and 16th cents, primarily as a result of the work of John (Jan)
Hus, the celebrated Czech religious reformer, who made the Prague dialect the basis of his far-reaching linguistic reforms.
The modern period of Czech began in the 17th cent. The domination of the Czechs by the Hapsburg rulers of Austria from 1620
to 1918 severely hampered the development of the Czech language and literature, although a national literary revival began
in the 18th cent.
After independence was regained in 1918, the language and literature of Czechoslovakia again began to flourish. Czech
was one of two official languages (the other being Slovak) of Czechoslovakia and remained the official language of the Czech
Republic after Czechoslovakia was dissolved in 1993. A modified version of the Roman alphabet is used for writing Czech.
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