Overview of the Slovak Language

Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by over 5 million people. Another million people who speak Slovak are scattered around the globe in other countries. The Slovak language is also one of the official languages of the European Union.

Slovak is a member of the West Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. As such, it is closely related to Czech and other Slavic languages.

The Slovak Alphabet and Slovak Pronunciation

The Slovak alphabet is a variation of the Latin alphabet, meaning it uses the same basic characters as English. However, the Slovak alphabet has 46 letters. It includes all 26 letters used in English, plus 17 letters which include diacritic marks and 3 digraphs (letters that are written as two characters but are considered a single letter).

The Slovak alphabet is shown below. Notice that the accented forms of each letter follow the unaccented form and that the letter ch follows the letter h, not the letter c.

The acute accent ´ indicates that the sound of the base letter is lengthened, while the circumflex over the ô and the umlaut over the ä change the basic sound of the letter. The caron, which appears like a small v over short letters and like an apostrophe next to tall letters, indicates that the sound is palatalized or softened.

Two other things to note about Slovak pronunciation are that stress always falls on the first syllable of a word and that a syllable with a long vowel sound cannot be followed by another syllable with a long vowel sound in the same word.

Slovak Vocabulary

Because the Slovak language is closely related to Czech, the two languages share many words. However, their vocabulary is not identical, and the languages have been gradually drifting further apart since separation of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Slovak has a lesser number of words in common with the related languages of Polish and Sorbian. It has also borrowed and lent a number of words to Hungarian, which is not otherwise linguistically related.

Slovak Grammar

Slovak nouns are divided into four grammatical genders: animate masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter. Nouns have singular and plural forms. They are also declined for case, meaning that they change form to indicate their role in a sentence. Slovak adjectives come before nouns and change form to match the noun they are modifying. Slovak verbs are conjugated to show tense and to match their subjects in person and number. There are no articles in Slovak.
 
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