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The Czech language is one of the West Slavic
languages, along with Slovak, Polish, Pomeranian, and Sorbian. It is spoken by most people in the Czech Republic and by Czechs all over the world (about 12 million native speakers in total).
Because of its complexity, Czech is said to be a difficult language to learn. The
complexity is due to extensive morphology and
highly free word order. As in any Slavic language, many words (esp. nouns, verbs, and adjectives) have many forms. Moreover the
rules are extremelly irregular and many forms have official, colloquial and sometimes semi-official variants. The word order
serves similar function as emphasis and articles in English. Often all the permutations of words in a clause are possible.
Czech's phonology may also be very difficult for speakers of many other
languages. For example, some words do not appear to have vowels: zmrzl,
ztvrdl, scvrkl, čtvrthrst. The consonants
l and r, however, function as sonorants and thus fulfill the role of a vowel. A similar phenomenon also occurs
American English (bird is pronounced as [brd] with a syllabic r). It also features the consonant ř, a
phoneme that is said to be unique to Czech and quite difficult for foreigners to
pronounce (it's close a sound that would be written as rzh in English).
Morphology
Parts of speech
Only nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numbers and verbs have inflections or declensions; remaining kinds have no morphology.
Flexible kinds have additional morphological attributes.
Declension
The cases of Czech are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, locative, and vocative. The numbers are singular,
plural, and remains of dual. The genders are masculine animate,
masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter.
See also: Czech alphabet, hacek
External links
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