Czech language

**Czech** (Czech *čeština*), historically also **Bohemian** (*lingua Bohemica* in Latin), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 10 million people, it serves as the official language of the Czech Republic. Czech is closely related to Slovak, to the point of high mutual intelligibility, as well as to Polish to a lesser degree. Czech is a fusional language with a rich system of morphology and relatively flexible word order. Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German.

The Czech–Slovak group developed within West Slavic in the high medieval period, and the standardization of Czech and Slovak within the Czech–Slovak dialect continuum emerged in the early modern period. In the later 18th to mid-19th century, the modern written standard became codified in the context of the Czech National Revival. The main non-standard variety, known as Common Czech, is based on the vernacular of Prague, but is now spoken as an interdialect throughout most of the Czech Republic. The Moravian dialects spoken in the eastern part 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 into "hard", "neutral" and "soft" categories). Words may contain complicated consonant clusters or lack vowels altogether. Czech has a raised alveolar trill, which is known to occur as a phoneme in only a few other languages, represented by the grapheme *ř*.

## Phonology

### Consonants

The following chart shows a complete list of the consonant phonemes of Czech:

### Vowels

There are 10 monophthongal and 3 diphthongal vowel phonemes in Czech: /iː ɪ ɛː ɛ aː a oː o uː u eu̯ au̯ ou̯/. Czech is a quantity language: it differentiates five vowel qualities that occur as both phonologically short and long. The short and long counterparts generally do not differ in their quality, although long vowels may be more peripheral than short vowels.

### Short vowels

/ɪ/ is spelled *i* and *y*
/ɛ/ is spelled *e* and *ě*
/a/ is spelled *a*
/o/ is spelled *o*
/u/ is spelled *u*
### Long vowels

Long vowels are indicated by an acute accent (*čárka*) or a ring (*kroužek*).

/iː/ is spelled *í* and *ý*
/ɛː/ is spelled *é*
/aː/ is spelled *á*
/oː/ is spelled *ó* (this phoneme occurs almost exclusively in words of foreign origin)
/uː/ is spelled *ú* and *ů* with the former only used when it is the first letter of an unbound morpheme, as well as in loanwords and onomatopoeia.
### Diphthongs

/au̯/ is spelled *au* (occurs almost exclusively in words of foreign origin)
/eu̯/ is spelled *eu* (occurs in words of foreign origin only)
/ou̯/ is spelled *ou*
The phonemes /o/ and /oː/ are sometimes transcribed /ɔ/ and /ɔː/. This transcription describes the pronunciation in Central Bohemia and Prague, which is more open. The standard pronunciation is something between [o(ː)] and [ɔ(ː)], i.e. mid back vowel.

The letter *ě* is not a separate vowel. It denotes /ɛ/ after a palatal stop or palatal nasal (e.g. *něco* /ɲɛtso/), /ɲɛ/ after /m/ (e.g. *měkký* /mɲɛkiː/), and /jɛ/ after other labial consonants (e.g. *běs* /bjɛs/).

The vowel sequences *ia, ie, ii, io*, and *iu* in foreign words are not diphthongs. They are pronounced with an epenthetic /j/ between the vowels: [ɪja, ɪjɛ, ɪjɪ, ɪjo, ɪju].