ABSTRACT
On purely statistical grounds, Czech and Slovak are by no means major languages, with around 9.5 and 4.5 million speakers in the Czech and Slovak republics respectively, whereas Ukrainian, for example, has around 40 million speakers. Since the break-up of Czechoslovakia, about half a million Slovaks elected to move to or stay in the Czech Republic. Both Czechs and Slovaks are, however, to be found scattered worldwide, either diffused or in close-knit villages and some larger communities in Romania, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Ukraine, due to local, mainly nineteenth-century, small-Croatia, Hungary, Poland and the Ukraine, due to local, mainly nineteenth-century, scale migrations or the vagaries of political frontiers, or in Canada, the USA and small-scale migrations or the vagaries of political frontiers, or in Canada, the USA and South America owing to the modern tradition of political or economic migration. After the fall of Communism, some Volhynian Czechs ‘returned’ from Ukraine and a number of post-World War II émigrés also returned from the West; conversely, since their home countries joined the European Union, increasing numbers of Czechs and Slovaks have arrived in Britain and Ireland, many intending to stay. The historical pockets of extra-territorial populations add several thousand to the total numbers of speakers; their languages, however, necessarily differ, through physical separation and the external influence of dominant languages in the alien environment, from the Czech and Slovak to be described in the following pages.
