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 the Ukraine, due to local, mainly nineteenth-century, 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. Since the fall of Communism, some Volhynian Czechs have ‘returned’ from the Ukraine and a number of post-World War II émigrés have 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. If not on statistical grounds, then historically Czech at least does have a claim as a
major language: the Kingdom of Bohemia controlled, in the Middle Ages, a much vaster area than just the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (Bohemia and Moravia) that still constitute the core of the Czech Republic; Bohemian kings have been Holy Roman Emperors, and twice there have been, among other international arrangements, AngloBohemian dynastic links through marriage. More recently, Czechoslovakia was, between the wars, a major economic force in Europe (mineral extraction, iron and steel, armaments, footwear), and its sportsmen have never been far to seek in many disciplines at international level (football, ice hockey, athletics, tennis). By contrast, until 1993 Slovakia had hardly ever enjoyed independence, coming
closest to it briefly during the Second World War as a client state of Germany; between
of a separate economic power it has only begun to assert itself in the twenty-first century, attracting much inward investment in, for example, the automotive, electronics and confectionery industries; surprisingly to many, it now leads Europe in per capita car production. The two languages are taken together in this volume because, despite the natural
processes of divergence brought about by geography, geopolitical separation and exposure to different influences of neighbouring languages (Czech is heavily influenced by German, Slovak by Hungarian; since the fall of Communism, both are, in the view of some, creaking under the impact of global English), they have a great deal in common and traditionally have been held to be about 90 per cent mutually intelligible. When they shared a common state, Czechs and Slovaks were each constantly exposed to the other language and mutual intelligibility was reinforced by, for example, labour mobility, military service and the media. Since the countries split, such reinforcement has been lost almost totally and the youngest generation sometimes claims to understand the other language no better than, say, Polish. Slovak post-independence language legislation also contributed to the decline. The similarities between the languages are highest at the lexical level (and new lex-
ical developments continue to show them evolving in tandem), though some of the most striking differences are also in this area. Phonologically and morphologically the differences between the standard forms of the two languages affect most words, though often not enough to impede comprehension. The overall distinctiveness between Czech and Slovak is, however, great enough for translations between the literatures to be a meaningful exercise, though such a view is not held universally.
