Language Information

The Czech alphabet consists of 42 letters. However, letters g, q, w, and x usually do not appear in Czech words (by origin).

Czech alphabet and pronunciation

• The acute accent letters (Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú, Ý) and Ů indicate long vowels. They have the same alphabetical ordering as their non-diacritic counterparts.
• The hacek (ˇ) indicates historical palatalization of the base letter. The letters Č, Ř, Š, and Ž currently represent postalveolar consonants and are ordered behind their corresponding base letters; while Ď, Ň, Ť represent palatal consonants and have the same alphabetical ordering as their non-diacritic counterparts.
• Stress is always on the first syllable in Czech; a monosyllabic preposition (if any) counts as the first syllable of the following word. A vowel in any syllable can be either long or short. The length of Czech vowels is completely independent on the stress.
• ě = [je] after p, b and v; [e] after d, t and n (which become palatalized: ď, ť, ň). After m, ě = [mɲe], but it is pronounced [mje] in some regions.
• ú in normally used at the beginning of words, while ů is used elsewhere, except in interrogatives and loan words.
• Word-final voiced consonants are pronounced unvoiced, even in loan words, e.g. chléb [xle:p], jazz [ʤes], rub [rup].

Grammar

The noun cases are typically referred to by number, and learned by means of the question to which they are the answer. There are seven cases in Czech: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative, Locative (also known as Prepositional) and Instrumental.

The case used depends on a number of variables, and for foreigners can be very confusing.

The numbers are singular, plural and remains of dual. The dual number is used for only several parts of the human body, of which each person has two: hands, shoulders, eyes, ears, knees, legs, breasts. In all but two of the above body parts (eyes and ears) the dual number is only vestigial and affects very few aspects of declension (mostly the genitive and prepositional cases).

Genders are masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter. Masculine animate is used only to describe living things (note: plants are not considered animate in Czech noun declension).

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