Czech

About Czech

Czech is the official language of the Czech Republic, with about 10.7 million native speakers. It is very close to Slovak, and Czechs and Slovaks understand each other without much effort.

Use vy for a polite "you" with strangers and older people, and ty with friends and children. Stress always falls on the first syllable. The small hook over a letter changes its sound: č is the ch in "church", š the sh in "shoe" and ž the s in "measure". The letter ř, as in the composer Dvořák, is a rolled r and zh said together and is found in no other major language. Some words have no vowel at all, like vlk (wolf), where the l carries the syllable.

FamilyIndo-European, West Slavic
Native speakersabout 10.7 million (2019)
Official inCzech Republic
ScriptLatin alphabet with háček and accent marks
Codescs (ISO 639-1), ces (ISO 639-3)

Speaker number: Ethnologue (2019), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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