Would you like to learn the Czech language?
Then allow us to introduce it to you.

The Czech language emerged as a distinct language from Old Slavic in the 10th Century AD.
The first somewhat rare documents in the Czech language are from this time.

There are however a large number of written materials in the Czech language from the 12th Century onwards.
For this reason Linguists consider this period to be the beginning of Czech as a distinct language.

How many people speak the Czech language?

Czech (cz. čeština) is today spoken by about 10 million in the Czech Republic as their first language.

Additionally another two million people mostly in the USA and Canada, but also in Germany, Austria and other countries speak Czech.

The Czech Alphabet

The Czech language uses the Roman alphabet, in contrast to most other Slavic languages like Russian and Ukrainian that use the Cyrillic alphabet.

The Czech alphabet has 34 letters.
Czech has five short vowels and five long vowels.

These are the short vowels in the Czech language.
a, e, i/y, o and u

These are the long vowels in the Czech language.
á, é/ ě, í/ý, ó and ú/ ů

Do you know these letters from the Czech alphabet?
č, ď, ch, ň, ř, š, ť and ž

Are you wondering how to pronounce the Czech alphabet?
We have recorded a Czech native speaker reciting the Czech alphabet.
Press the “Play” button to hear the Czech alphabet.

Abcčdďefg, hchijklmnňop, qrřsštťuvw, xyzž.

Czech – a Slavic language

Czech belongs to the Slavic group of languages.

The Slavic group of languages are subdivided into East Slavic (Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian), South Slavic (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Macedonian) and the West Slavic group of languages.
In this last group of languages belong Slovakian, Polish and Czech.

All of these languages originated in Proto Slavic, that developed as a separate branch of the Indo-European languages about five thousand years ago.

Today, Slavic languages are spoken by 300 million native speakers world wide.

Characteristics of Czech

Number of speakers 13 million
Official language of the Czech Republic
Slavic Language
Capital letters only for Proper nouns
No article
Seven cases (Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Vocative, Locative and Instrumental)
Script: Roman alphabet, with a few additional letters
All of these extra letters or signs are integrated into the Learning software, so that they can be written in the learning exercises

Would you like to learn more about the Czech Language?

We are delighted about your interest in the Czech language.
We have prepared a few weblinks for you:

Here is the Wikipedia entry about the Czech language.
If you would like to learn Czech, then you can find here the Czech language course from 17 Minute Languages.
We offer online courses at all levels:
A1/A2: Basic Czech
B1/B2: Advanced Czech
C1/C2: Advanced Czech Vocabulary
B1-C2: Business Czech
Here is the Wikipedia entry about the Czech Republic.
Are you planning a trip to the Czech Republic?
You might find this tourism site interesting.
Or maybe you want to take a look at the website of Czech Airlines?