Slovak ( ; endonym: or ), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. It is part of the Indo-European language family, and is one of the Slavic languages, which are part of the larger Balto-Slavic branch. Spoken by approximately five million people as a native language, primarily ethnic Slovaks, it serves as the official language of Slovakia and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union.
Slovak is closely related to Czech, to the point of very high mutual intelligibility, as well as to Polish. Like other Slavic languages, Slovak is a fusional language with a complex system of morphology and relatively flexible word order. Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German, as well as other Slavic languages.
History
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 mid-19th century, the modern Slovak alphabet and written standard became codified by Ľudovít Štúr and reformed by Martin Hattala. The Moravian dialects spoken in the western part of the country along the border with the Czech Republic are also sometimes classified as Slovak, although some of their western variants are closer to Czech; they nonetheless form the bridge dialects between the two languages.
Geographic distribution and status
Slovak language is primarily spoken in Slovakia. The country's constitution declared it the official language of the state (štátny jazyk):
Constitution of Slovakia, Article 6.
Beside that, national minorities and ethnic groups also have explicit permission to use their distinct languages. Slovakia is a country with an established language policy concerning its official language.
Regulation Standard Slovak () is defined by an Act of Parliament on the State Language of the Slovak Republic (language law). According to this law, the Ministry of Culture approves and publishes the codified form of Slovak based on the judgment of specialised Slovak linguistic institutes and specialists in the area of the state language. This is traditionally the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics, which is part of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In practice, the Ministry of Culture publishes a document that specifies authoritative reference books for standard Slovak usage, which is called the codification handbook (). The current regulations were published on 15 March 2021. There are four such publications: '', 2013; (orthographic rules) '', 2020; (dictionary) '', 2009; (pronunciation) '', 1966; (morphology)
Slovak speakers are also found in the Slovak diaspora in the United States, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Serbia, Ireland, Romania, Poland, Canada, Hungary, Germany, Croatia, Israel, the United Kingdom, Australia, Austria, Ukraine, Norway, and other countries to a lesser extent.
The Slovak language is one of the official languages of Autonomous Province of Vojvodina.
Slovak language high schools abroad
Budapest, 'Szlovák Tanítási Nyelvű Óvoda, Általános Iskola, Gimnázium és Kollégium' Békéscsaba, 'Szlovák Gimnázium, Általános Iskola, Óvoda és Kollégium' Bački Petrovac, 'Ján Kollár Gymnasium and Students' Home' Kovačica, 'Gimnazija Mihailo Pupin' Nădlac, 'Liceul Teoretic Jozef Gregor Tajovský'
Dialects
There are many Slovak dialects, which are divided into the following four basic groups: Western Slovak dialects (Trenčín, Trnava, Nitra, Záhorie) Central Slovak dialects (in Liptov, Orava, Turiec, Tekov, Hont, Novohrad, Gemer and around Zvolen.) Eastern Slovak dialects (in Spiš, Šariš, Zemplín and Abov) Lowland (dolnozemské) Slovak dialects (outside Slovakia in the Pannonian Plain in Serbian Vojvodina, and in southeastern Hungary, western Romania, and the Croatian part of Syrmia)
The fourth group of dialects is often not considered a separate group, but a subgroup of Central and Western Slovak dialects (see e.g. Štolc, 1968), but it is currently undergoing changes due to contact with surrounding languages (Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, and Hungarian) and long-time geographical separation from Slovakia (see the studies in Zborník Spolku vojvodinských slovakistov, e.g. Dudok, 1993).
The dialect groups differ mostly in phonology, vocabulary, and tonal inflection. Syntactic differences are minor. Central Slovak forms the basis of the present-day standard language. Not all dialects are fully mutually intelligible. It may be difficult for an inhabitant of the western Slovakia to understand a dialect from eastern Slovakia and the other way around.
The dialects are fragmented geographically, separated by numerous mountain ranges. The first three groups already existed in the 10th century. All of them are spoken by the Slovaks outside Slovakia, and central and western dialects form the basis of the lowland dialects (see above).
The western dialects contain features common with the Moravian dialects in the Czech Republic, the southern central dialects contain a few features common with South Slavic languages, and the eastern dialects a few features common with Polish and the East Slavonic languages (cf. Štolc, 1994). Lowland dialects share some words and areal features with the languages surrounding them (Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, and Romanian).
Phonology
Slovak contains 15 vowel phonemes (11 monophthongs and four diphthongs) and 29 consonants.
+ Slovak vowel phonemes Front Back short long short long Close Mid () Open () Diphthongs
The phoneme /æ/ is marginal and often merges with /e/; the two are normally only distinguished in higher registers.
Vowel length is phonemic in Slovak and both short and long vowels have the same quality. In addition, Slovak, unlike Czech, employs a "rhythmic law" which forbids two long vowels from following one another within the same word. In such cases the second vowel is shortened. For example, adding the locative plural ending to the root creates , not . This law also applies to diphthongs; for example, the adjective meaning "white" is , not (compare Czech ).
+ Slovak consonant phonemes Labial Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal Plosive Affricate Fricative Approximant Trill
Slovak has final devoicing; when a voiced consonant () is at the end of a word before a pause, it is devoiced to its voiceless counterpart (, respectively). For example, is pronounced and is pronounced .
Consonant clusters containing both voiced and voiceless elements are entirely voiced if the last consonant is a voiced one, or voiceless if the last consonant is voiceless. For example, is pronounced and is pronounced . This rule also applies across word boundaries. For example, (to come home) and (more strawberries). The voiced counterpart of "" is , and the unvoiced counterpart of "" is .
Orthography
Slovak uses the Latin script with small modifications that include the four diacritics (ˇ, ´, ¨, ˆ) placed above certain letters ()
Letters displayed in Italic are used in loanwords and foreign names.
The primary principle of Slovak spelling is the phonemic principle. The secondary principle is the morphological principle: forms derived from the same stem are written in the same way even if they are pronounced differently. An example of this principle is the assimilation rule (see below). The tertiary principle is the etymological principle, which can be seen in the use of i after certain consonants and of y after other consonants, although both i and y are usually pronounced the same way.
Finally, the rarely applied grammatical principle occurs when, for example, the basic singular form and plural form of masculine adjectives are written differently with no difference in pronunciation (e.g. = nice – singular versus = nice – plural). Such spellings are most often remnants of differences in pronunciation that were present in Proto-Slavic (in Polish, where the vowel merger did not occur, and and in Czech and are pronounced differently).
Most loanwords from foreign languages are respelt using Slovak principles either immediately or later. For example, "weekend" is spelled , "software" – , "gay" – (both not exclusively), and "quality" is spelled . Personal and geographical names from other languages using Latin alphabets keep their original spelling unless a Slovak exonym exists (e.g. for "London").
Slovak features some heterophonic homographs (words with identical spelling but different pronunciation and meaning), the most common examples being (beautiful) versus (beautifully).
Grammar Syntax The main features of Slovak syntax are as follows: The verb (predicate) agrees in person and number with its subject.
Some examples include the following: . (The+singer+feminine suffix is+singing.) (, where -∅ is (the empty) third-person-singular ending)
. (Singer+feminine suffix +plural suffix are+singing.) (; is a third-person-plural ending, and /j/ is a hiatus sound)
. (We the+singer+feminine suffix +plural suffix are+singing.) (, where is the first-person-plural ending) and so forth. Adjectives, pronouns and numerals agree in person, gender and case with the noun to which they refer. Adjectives precede their noun. Botanic or zoological terms are exceptions (e.g. , literally "cat wild", ) as is the naming of Holy Spirit () in a majority of churches.
Word order in Slovak is relatively free, since strong inflection enables the identification of grammatical roles (subject, object, predicate, etc.) regardless of word placement. This relatively free word order allows the use of word order to convey topic and emphasis.
Some examples are as follows: . = That big man is opening a store there today. ( = that; = big; = man; = there; = today; = opens; = store) – The word order does not emphasize any specific detail, just general information. . = That big man is today opening a store there. – This word order emphasizes the place ( = there). . = Today over there a store is being opened by that big man. – This word order focuses on the person who is opening the store ( = that; = big; = man). . = The store over there is today being opened by that big man. – Depending on the intonation the focus can be either on the store itself or on the person.
The unmarked order is subject–verb–object. Variation in word order is generally possible, but word order is not completely free. In the above example, the noun phrase cannot be split up, so that the following combinations are not possible: . . ...
And the following sentence is stylistically infelicitous: . (Only possible in a poem or other forms of artistic style.)
The regular variants are as follows:
Morphology
Articles Slovak, like every major Slavic language other than Bulgarian and Macedonian, does not have articles. The demonstrative pronoun in masculine form (that one) or in feminine and in neuter respectively, may be used in front of the noun in situations where definiteness must be made explicit.
Nouns, adjectives, pronouns
Slovak nouns are inflected for case and number. There are six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, and instrumental. The vocative is purely optional and most of the time unmarked. It is used mainly in spoken language and in some fixed expressions: mum (nominative) vs. mum! (vocative), , dad (N) vs. , dad! (V), Mr., sir vs. sir (when addressing someone e.g. in the street). There are two numbers: singular and plural. Nouns have inherent gender. There are three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Adjectives and pronouns must agree with nouns in case, number, and gender.
Numerals